


Nothing in Haste

by Lonelygreydog



Category: Marvel (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Tommy's past, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2019-10-25 17:03:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 28,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17729243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lonelygreydog/pseuds/Lonelygreydog
Summary: Billy wants to help Tommy get over his past, so he suggests that Tommy writes down some of his feelings. Tommy doesn't have feelings, but he agrees to do it anyway. What follows is a recollection of Tommy's past leading up to the events in Young Avengers Volume 1He doesn't have a cannon backstory, and I just wanted to fill in the gaps.





	1. Chapter 1

My story isn’t anything out of the ordinary, but Billy said I should go ahead and write it down anyway. He thinks it’ll help me clear my mind and help me to let go of thing, but I don’t think that will work. I am stuck in the past, he said, but writing about it will help me to move on. Like that will work. I think I should go ahead and start in the beginning, like my childhood or something. That way I can work towards the end and actually have something decent when I’m done with this. I grew up in Springfield, New Jersey. It’s really not any place special, but it was my home. It was a small little house in a small neighborhood and it was just the three of us. My mom, my dad and me. That’s why it doesn’t really matter that it was a small place, because it was just three people. Sometimes it was just me and my mom, which was better. We were the only house without a fence out front, but I think it looks real stupid anyway. We didn’t have a dog, either, so it didn't matter that we never had a fence like our neighbor. Her name was Carole or something and she had this small little dog that would bark at everyone who walked in front of her house. He sat inside that fenced-in yard until one day he escaped through a loose board. We never saw him after that. That’s all I have to say about that dog. I think his name was Rover. He was nice once you got him to let you pet him, but he really did like to bark. My parents hated the noise and that’s why we never really got along with those neighbors. That and the fact that I would go over there after school sometimes and ask for candy if she had it. I didn’t find a problem with it, but Carole went over to my Mom one day to complain about it. She never told me she had a problem, so how was I supposed to know? I hate people who expect a person to read their mind. Anyway, my mom really hated that she came over about it, but I got in trouble for it anyway. I stopped going over to her house after that. 

When Carole came over to make a fuss, I was sitting down on the couch doing some reading for school. It was a book about tuberculosis that I was reading in my english class, and it really was an interesting book. Being dyslexic, I never did read too much, but my mom didn’t think I was really dyslexic so I still had to read it. She thought I was faking because I could read when I really needed to, but it was hard sometimes. The words would always jump around and I couldn’t focus on reading. Sometimes I would read the same sentence or paragraph fifty times before I could move on. My mom said that wasn’t dyslexia. She said I was just slow in the head. Maybe I was, but I was still getting top marks in some of my classes. The book I was reading started out with the theory that the disease had been around since before the stone age. Imagine that. Dinosaurs getting sick with the cough. I think that’s ridiculous. When Carole knocked, I was reading about the hospitals people were sent to in the early twentieth century. They were called Sanatoriums and people would stay there until they died all alone. It was sad, really. 

She knocked on the door two time and then two times again. A person who knocks in a rhythm is always crazy. You can tell if they knock like that because it means that they think way too much and too hard about the wrong things. People like that spend hours looking over receipts or cards or something but couldn’t pick up a real book if it killed them, unless it was a magazine or something like that. My mom answered the door and Carole walked inside without even waiting to be invited in. I should probably explain what she looks like. She was an older lady with curly hair that was just starting to gray. The rest of it was this hazel color and it was almost always tied back in a tight bun. Old women who tie their hair up all tight are tight and stuck up themselves. I never met a woman who wasn’t all stuck-up with tight hair. Carole was around my height, which means she was short because I was a short kid. She was also the type of person to barge into a house without waiting to be invited in, which is exactly what she did then.  
My mom was all surprised by this, and I could tell she was getting a little bit angry. “Hello?” She said like a question. She was still standing in the doorway.

“Mrs. Shepherd, would you mind if I came in to talk about your son?” She asked, which was strange to me because she was already inside. Why would she ask to come in if she was already in the house? When she talked, she looked directly at me which made me nervous. I stood up to hide up stairs, but my mom pointed at the chair so I sat back down. I opened my book again and started reading about the Sanitariums. Did you know that people back then actually thought that fresh air could cure a disease instead of medicine? People were stupid back then. 

My mom and Carole started having a conversation, but I didn’t hear what they were talking about because I was too busy thinking about what it would be like to live back then. Imagine getting sick with the cough and having to move away for it today like they did back then. I wouldn’t have to go to school or read stupid books about tuberculosis and all I’d have to do was sit in bed and talk to other people from around the country. Then I’d die, which would suck, but at least I wouldn't have to sit and wait to be yelled at by two crazy women. And don’t think I’m sexist or anything like that. I love women, more than men even, but my mom and Carole were the type of women who acted like how women were expected to act. They didn’t work and they got all riled up about stupid things, like celebrities and cooking ware. That’s how moms were in the suburbs. They invited all the other moms and their kids to each other's houses so they could brag about their stupid kids even though you could tell that they really hated them. They all married too young and had kids too young. They never got to experience being young or youthful, and were spiteful against their kids for it, as if they weren’t the ones who chose to have kids. They would only brag about their stupid kids when we weren’t around though. When we were in the room, they would use that time to complain about us with these big fake smiles on their faces like it was the funniest thing in the world that their kid was flunking out of three of their classes. I didn’t think it was funny. I hated those days. The suburb kids were all morons too.

“Thomas,”my mom said in this voice that reeked of false compassion and very real aggression. I pretended not to hear her and I continued to read. Did you know that the last Sanitarium was closed in 2012 in Florida? That wasn’t in my book, but I just looked it up while writing this because I was curious. “Thomas!” She said again, this time a little more aggressive. Two things crossed my mind. I could sit there and pretend to not hear her and continue my book, but then she would be more mad at me and maybe she would yell at me in front of Carole. I didn’t want that. I liked Carole. I could look up then and get yelled at, but maybe she wouldn’t be as mad. I really didn’t feel like getting yelled at. I looked up. 

“Is that true?” She asked me, as if I knew any of the shit she was talking about. Of course it wasn’t true though. Carole was a liar and she always was telling my mom what a bad kid I was. I shook my head. “No.” I said.

Carole gasped in the way that all old women do when they are offended, even placing her hands on her chest in that fake dramatic way that pissed me off so much. I hate it when people do that shit. “You little liar!” She exclaimed, as if it would make me feel guilty. It really makes me feel guilty, but I never feel guilty about things. Especially about things that old woman get all riled up about. “I know it was you who stole that money off of that counter. You were the only one who could have done it.”

I hate to say it, but she wasn’t lying. I had stolen her money, but if my mom found out she was telling the truth, I would probably be beaten. I couldn’t let my mom know that she was being honest, so I raised an eyebrow all confused like and tilted my head to the side. “What are you talking about? I never saw any money, and even if I did, I would never steal it. If I see anything I’ll let you know. Maybe there was a burglary or something. There was a burglary on the news I think. I think it was yesterday or something. I was watching it, but I don’t think it was your house.”

“Thomas,” my mom said all of a sudden, “please stop talking.” She sighed and tried to collect her nerves. She was mad at me, but she didn’t want Carole to know. If she was mad at me, it would mean I stole the money, which I didn't. Well, I did. It was bad of me, but I had stolen her money one day when she let me in to eat some cookies she had baked. I didn’t want to steal her money, honest, but there was this game I really wanted to buy that we couldn’t afford. It was only forty bucks I took, which is why I couldn’t understand how riled up she was getting. Forty bucks. What could you do with that? “I want you to be completely honest with me,” she continued all slow because she thought I was stupid. I’m not stupid. I just don’t care enough to act smart. People who want to show off how much they know are stupid, I think. They never let you talk, and when they do, it’s just to correct you or explain something really stupid so they feel better about themselves. Smart people don’t talk about how smart they are. They sit and listen, and they think a lot. People who think don’t have time to talk. I talk a lot sometimes, which I guess makes me stupid. She continued, “Did you steal the money? Think long and hard if you have to.” I shook my head. “No.”

Carole was exasperated about this, and she continued to talk with my mom. I stopped listening and began to count the freckles on my arms. I stopped counting at 67, which wasn’t very much. I think it was just the ones on the top of my forearm. I have a lot of freckles, which is weird because I have darker skin. Mostly white people have freckles. My parents are white. I’m not. I’m adopted, which my parents reminded me of a lot, especially when I misbehaved. They would threaten to send me back into the foster system because they didn’t adopt me until right before they got divorced. My mom wanted to claim me for child support. I also had slightly curly dark hair. It’s not dark anymore. My eyes also used to be this light brown color. They’re not anymore. 

Carole left about 10 hours later, or at least it felt like it. My mom sent me to my room and she only talked to me at dinner. She grounded me and told me I wasn’t allowed to go to Carole’s house anymore. I was depressed about that because I like going over there, I really did, and I really liked the little dog and the candy. My mom then sent me back upstairs and I didn’t finish my homework. I sat on my bed and thought about doing my homework, but I never did. I counted the freckles on my arm. There was 312 on one arm. The other arm had around 400.


	2. Chapter 2

I have ADHD, which means attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. I also was diagnosed with conduct disorder and ASD, but if this story is in chronological order, that wasn’t until later. I was diagnosed with ADHD in second grade. If you don’t know, conduct disorder is what they diagnose sociopathic kids with because they can’t technically call a 15 year old a sociopath. I don’t know why that is. They also don’t use the word sociopath. It’s apparently “antisocial personality disorder”, which makes it seem like something like social anxiety, which it isn’t. Billy has social anxiety. I feel like sociopath describes it better because it sounds like psychopath, but a little less extreme. I used to watch a lot of true crime shows because my mom did when she wasn’t watching cooking shows. She never cooked. A lot of those people were sociopaths. Not on the cooking shows, the true crime I mean. I don’t like that people focus on mental illness when talking about serial killers. We’re not like that. Bad people are like that. People also think a lot of dictators or political leaders are sociopaths, because sociopaths are manipulative and lack empathy. I think anyone can be called that, really. There’s not a damn person out there who isn’t manipulative or self-centered. I think those who pretend to be holy are the worst. They’re really not much better, but since they act like it, they can get you to do whatever favor they want out of you. And I’m the sociopath. I think I’m done talking about sociopaths. 

My parents names’ were Frank and Mary Shepherd. I never really got to know my dad because my parents started fighting real bad when I was in first grade. He was out of the house a lot, and I don’t regret not getting to know him. He was a drunk, and when he was home, he would beat my mom and sometimes me. They got divorced when I was in seventh grade, which is when I am starting my story. Seventh grade is also when I started flunking some classes. My mom got really depressed around this time, too. She wasn’t there for me after that, but how could I blame her for it? Once my dad left, she was left with a troubled ADHD kid and no job. She never did make an attempt to get a real job. Sometimes she would work at a grocery store, but we mostly lived off of child support. That’s why I took the forty bucks. I stole a lot more than I’d like to admit. I also ran away from home some. They sent me to detention centers because of this. They always blamed me for it, not my situation. If you were in my situation, you would do the same I think. 

I met Lisa in one of the detention centers. She never told me why she was there, and I never asked. She was a troubled kid too, and she relied on stealing to get by. She was not a bad person though, but most people wouldn’t think twice to get close enough to her to realize that. I hate how people get so judgemental when they’ve never suffered a second in their life. I think I loved Lisa. She had this punk style and constant resting-bitch-face, which would deter most people, but it wasn’t enough to keep me away. Where most people saw a basketcase, I knew a talented artist who was just dealt a bad deck of cards. 

I am going to take some time to describe her. She was beautiful. If you ever got her to soften her facial features, which was damn near impossible, she had these soft, pinkish cheeks and thoughtful eyes. Her eyes were a goddamn masterpiece. People always make a big deal about blue eyes or green eyes, but the right pair of brown eyes can just take your breath away. They were tigers eye or amber or something like that. These cute little olive shapes too. Her lips were thoughtful and this dark and natural shade of cherry. She was a real masterpiece, swear to God. 

I wasn’t in seventh grade when I met her though. I was in eighth grade and not yet 14 years old. I think she was already 14, but she was in ninth grade. I don’t think she liked me at first, but most people don’t when they meet me. Billy didn’t even like me at first. I don’t know if he likes me now. 

We had school in the detention center because it's illegal for people under the age of sixteen to be kept from receiving an education. I forget what we were learning about then, but I remember her. Lisa I mean. I sat on one side of the room, the opposite of hers, because everything was gender seperated. The seats and tables were cafeteria-style, and I was sitting on the end of the isle. She was also on the end, but opposite of me, which meant we could talk if we wanted to. It was a bad idea to talk, though. They weren’t too fond of that there. The people there were crazy about control and schedule. You had to eat on a schedule, sleep on a schedule, shower on a schedule, and even talk on a schedule. They hated it if you didn’t follow their schedule and they’d call you uncooperative and put you in the padded room. I was only taken there a couple times. It wasn’t so bad there if it meant I didn’t have to go to group therapy. I hated that more than anything else. I hated having to hear about other people's sorry lives and stupid decisions. It was their fault they were in here, and they wanted me to feel bad about it as if it was my fault. I also didn’t like talking about myself. They had no right to my life and they certainly had no right to my feelings. I don’t have feelings and I don’t have to talk about them. 

I was the only one in there for stealing a car, which isn’t all that surprising to be honest. I wanted to leave the state and I don’t even know why. I just wanted to get away from home. The police didn’t consider that when they arrested me. I was sentenced one year for it. I had driven all the way to Pennsylvania before I was caught. They took me back to New Jersey for serving time. Before that, I checked into a hotel, but I left the car in the parking lot and checked in with my real name. I didn’t even think about using a fake name or hiding the car, so they found me. Anyway, that’s why I think I’m stupid. 

I walked up to the desk and I asked them for a room. The hotel was small and not very nice. The carpet was dirty and the walls were cream. They were supposed to be white. The carpet had this geometric pattern with red rectangular hexagons with little blue circles in the middle. The hexagons overlapped with each other to create a gridlock. There were also these green squares, but I don’t know how to describe that. It was ugly. They gave me a room and the floor had the same pattern. There were two twin beds and a closet and bathroom with a shower. I brought a backpack with me, which I put three changes of clothing, a couple hundred bucks I stole from my mom, and a couple of my favorite books. If your curious, it was Percy Jackson, the Hobbit, and this 100 animal facts book. I don’t know why I brought that one, but it was my favorite book in elementary school so it felt right to bring it. I also brought a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. I’m not the most proud of the fact that I smoked, but it was better than some of the drugs people at school took. I collapsed in the bed with my arms above my head. I threw my backpack down on the floor and let myself breath. It was so hard to breath. My mom had just gotten through yelling at me for ruining her life. I had taken food out of the pantry because I was just so damn hungry. I took too much and we were poor as it is. She said I was wasting her money and that I’d put us on the streets if I kept doing shit like that. She was mad, but I yelled back. She hit me and called me ungrateful for all she sacrificed for me. I left after that with her car. I think she called the police on me.

I had this big bruise on my cheek where she hit. I noticed it in the mirror when I walked in the bathroom to take a shower. I always liked how the water felt when I was stressed. I don’t know why, but it just calmed me down. I moved my head in a couple different angles, moving my mouth to the left so I could see it better. I looked like shit, and not just because of the bruise. I had these big bags under my eyes. Ugly, purple things they were. I was also really skinny, which was more obvious when I took off my clothes to shower. I suppose I would have looked more awkward if I was tall. I hated the whole lanky tall and skinny look. It’s the one instance where I was okay being short. I was under five feet then. I’m 5’3” now and I’m 17, which really sucks, especially if your trying to get a date. No girl wants to date a guy shorter than them. My twin is 5’8”, but I hadn’t met him yet at that point. We were put up for adoption when we were young, so we didn’t grow up with each other. I’m not fully convinced we’re related, but he’s convinced so. I don’t like to argue with him too much about it because he’s actually a pretty lonely person and having family makes him feel good about himself. I never liked family. 

After my shower, I got changed into something to sleep in and I pulled out a cigarette. I know you have to pay extra to smoke in those hotel rooms, but at the time I just couldn’t give a damn. I didn’t even stand out on the balcony or anything. It was winter so it was too cold anyway. I held it between my fingers and lit it up. I just watched the glowing little end for a bit because I hadn’t had any of the lights on and I liked the way it looked. I smoked it and after that I tried to sleep, but it was hard so I smoked another one. I think I smoked the whole pack. I hadn’t done it before like that, but I was just so damn stressed and scared I didn’t know what to do. I think I slept after that.


	3. Chapter 3

Everyone says that middle school is the worst time of a person's life. Everyone I’ve talked to, at least, which happens to be a bunch of 14 to 18 year olds. I’d have to agree with them, except on the premise that high school exists. For the record, I never officially made it past my sophomore year of high school. That’s how bad it was for me. I would tell that story, but I’m supposed to be talking about middle school, which was almost the worst time of my life. Before I was arrested for stealing the car, I got in some trouble for stealing food from time to time. I was never arrested for it, because after I was let off with a warning, I made sure I wasn’t caught for it. 

For the record, when kids start doing bad things, its because they have to, not because they want to. Its like that old dog saying “there's no such thing as bad dogs, just bad owners”. Except it’s “there’s no such thing as bad kids, just bad parents”. People are like dogs anyway, as bad as it sounds. Billy said this isn’t going to work unless I start writing about my feelings, so I guess that’s how I feel. 

The summer after seventh grade was the worst for me. That was right before I stole the car, for context. As I said before, seventh grade was when I started flunking classes. My mom wasn’t too fond of that, but I still flunked two classes: History and Pre-Algebra. I got a couple Cs, but I did manage to get an A in English. It was my favorite subject then. I don’t care for reading much anymore, and if you couldn’t tell by my elementary writing, I hate that as well. I had to write a lot about that tuberculosis book, which wasn’t too bad. I also read a book about World War II and the Navajo code talkers and this book called “The Outsiders”, which is kind of what I’m doing right now. I liked “The Outsiders”, but I couldn’t tell you shit about it now. The books we read then were much better than the shit in sophomore year. I think that was 1984 and a Brave New World. It was all the shit that was supposed to make you feel bad for the state of humanity as if I gave a shit about that. We also read Lord of the Flies, which I liked. I think if I were stranded on an island, I’d end up like Roger. Billy would be Piggy.

During summer, I wasn’t allowed to do much, because my mom grounded me for flunking classes. It was boring. That’s all I have to say about my summer. 

It was sometime in july, after the fourth, and I was out of the house for some reason I forget. I didn’t have a bike because it had been stolen some time the previous year, so I had to walk to the store in the summer heat. I had gotten a lock and everything and carefully left it outside, but the cord had been cut away when I returned. I tried to get the police involved, but they wouldn’t open a file for me. They said it wasn’t a big enough crime for them to do anything. “Everyone gets their bikes stolen”, they said. Anyway, I was walking to the store that day. I had this new lock picking set with me that I had stolen off of some guy in my second period class. He was showing it off to everyone, which pissed me off. He always had these cool things he showed off to everyone because he had money and he could afford it. His name was Alex Russell, and he was this tall guy with short dark hair and a lot of acne that he never picked at. I would always pick at my acne if I got it, so it pissed me off that he never did. People who leave that sort of thing are stupid, I think. A smart person notices details, such as acne. That’s why I picked at it. When I saw it, I couldn’t help it. It made my skin look all red sometimes, but at least there wasn’t any gross little white marks poking out of my skin. It’s okay to leave blackheads, I think, but they are much more satisfying to mess with anyway. I get these little blackheads on my nose and chin that I always mess with when I see myself in a mirror. I don’t think he knew it was me who took it. The lock picking set I mean.

The sun was right over head when I got to the shopping center. There were a couple clouds, but not enough to make the weather any cooler. The parking lot was pretty empty, which was good. There was one red car, and a couple cars that were normal car colors. Normal car colors are black, white, and gray. Sometimes I think blue is a normal car color, but the gray-blue color. Sometimes I don’t think it is. Right now it isn’t, so there were two blue cars. There was also a bike that was locked up on a bike stand outside the store I told my mom I was going to. It wasn’t in view of the store window, which was also good. 

I was careful when I did, so nobody noticed when I picked the lock on the bike. Also, nobody noticed that it wasn’t my bike when I rode it home. My mom never asked me about the bike. I surveyed the area carefully, making sure nobody was outside. I paced back and forth, taking care to look inside the cars to be sure nobody would witness the crime. I then quickly went to work, kneeling down by the bike and grabbing the lock in my hands. I fiddled with it longer than I should have, cursing under my breath when I couldn’t get the lock to unlock. I had practiced a lot with doors and other things, which was a relative success, but when my adrenaline kicked in, it was damn near impossible to focus. I heard a door open and stiffened. I was going to get caught and then I’d be in more trouble than I already was for flunking my classes. There were footsteps. The person didn’t see me. I could breath after that. He unlocked his car ad drove away before I started working on the bike again. He had one of the white cars, but it wasn’t white. It was this slightly browned color from dirt, and the windshield had a lot of little leaves and bugs on in. I broke the lock before anyone else left the store. I then thought about what the policeman had told me: “Everyone gets their bikes stolen”. Nobody would look into this, so I felt pretty safe leaving with the bike. I didn’t feel bad about it, which I felt pretty bad about. 

I rode into the neighborhood, and Carole’s dog was outside on the yard. It started barking at me and wagging its tail, so I pulled over, carefully laying the bike down on the sidewalk. Even though I wasn’t allowed to go to Carole’s house anymore, I still wanted to pet her dog. It was still hot outside, so I gave the dog some of the water from the water bottle I took with me. It was happy about this and licked it up off of the floor. Let me explain what the dog looked like. His name was Rover. He was this small little white dog with wiry fur. He was usually pretty clean, but sometimes his fur would clump up near his mouth because of water or food. It was gross when that happened. I never pet him when his fur clumped up. Carole was outside on the porch doing some reading. I think she was sitting outside because her air conditioner had broken and it was hotter inside than it was outside. She saw me, and I think she forgot about the forty bucks, because she waved at me. I waved back even though I wasn’t allowed to be at her house. Her house was right next to ours and it had this fence outfront to keep the dog from running away. It wasn’t one of those chain-link metal fences, but one of the wood ones. That’s how the dog was able to escape, because one of the boards got loose and the dog got out. Her house was this cream color, but it was supposed to be cream. Our house was cream, but it was supposed to be white. I notice things like that a lot. Our house also didn’t have a fence out front, but we had a tree and she didn’t. She used to have a tree but the roots started to break the piping. She had to tear down the tree, which was a shame, because her tree was really good for climbing. She used to have a tire swing that she let me use, too. It was for her kids when she had them, and since her kids moved away she never took it down. When she had people tear the tree down, she asked me if I wanted the swing. I told her that I did, but my mom didn’t want me to have it. She gave it to the other kids in the neighborhood. They were brother and sister and lived across the street and to the left of Carole’s. We were on the right of Carole’s. James was 10 and Lizzie was 14. I was 13 at the time. 

Anyway, Carole stood up to come over to talk to me, so I got on my bike and rode back to my house. I didn’t feel like talking to her. 

When I got home, I put the bike in my garage. I sat in there for a bit, but it got too hot, so I went back inside. I had to open the door quietly in case my mom was asleep. She would have made a fuss about it if I woke her up. She always did. The living room was dark when I walked in, so I assumed she was sleeping. I relaxed. It was almost always worse when she was awake because she’d yell at me then. She always did. I quietly closed the door behind me and drifted towards the kitchen. 

I opened the fridge and stared for a little bit. There wasn’t any food worth eating, so I closed it and opened the pantry. There wasn’t any decent food in the pantry, so I closed it and looked in the fridge again. I repeated this a couple times before settling on eating a peanut butter sandwich. I hate peanut butter, but that's only because I ate it so goddamn much. Anyway, when I took the bread out the wrapper made this awful crinkly noise that stressed me out so damn much. 

“Absolutely not!” My mom shrieked from the living room. I never thought to check to see if she was sleeping on the couch or something, which of course she was. She must have heard the bread-wrapper sound too. She waited for any sign that I heard her, but when I continued to make my sandwich, she had to make her presence known again. “Absolutely not! What time is it?”

I rolled my eyes and glanced over at the clock. I was so damn rude sometimes.“1:15” I said in this monotonous voice I am proud of. I don’t understand what she was trying to get at. She stood up and fast-walked into the kitchen. And what I’m talking about is that aggressive walk all suburban moms do when they know they’re about to cause a scene. The walk with the clenched fists and everything. The only thing was that it was just me, so I don’t know why she would want to cause a scene. She had no audience. She stood there, crossing her arms and tapping her foot in a way you’d think was only on tv. Suburban moms do it too. “And what are the rules?” She quizzed, but I had no idea what rule she was going to claim existed this time. That was the thing with her. Her rules were never consistent. They just started existing when she needed them. I got in trouble for a lot of rules “I should have known” that she just kind of willed into existence. I thought for a moment, trying to come up with a satisfactory answer. She got mad when you didn’t answer her. She was getting mad with every passing second. 

“I don’t know,” I finally offered, but this did the opposite of please her. 

“The rule is,” She said all slow again, because she thought I was stupid, “that lunch time is between 12:00 and 1:00. What time is it?”

I didn’t understand why she asked this, because I had already answered her before. I thought about telling her that, but that would only make her yell at me more. I finished putting the peanut butter on with the knife and I placed it in the sink. I never rinsed it off when I knew my mom was going to do dishes, because she never rinsed her stuff off for me. I took a bite of my sandwich. “1:17,” I answered after glancing at the analogue clock, “it’s only 17 minutes.” I said this while chewing. It always pissed her off when I talked with food in my mouth. I think especially when it was something gross like peanut butter. 

“Yes, it’s been 17 minutes. Which means it’s after lunch time. If you wanted to eat, you would have been home sooner. Did you just conveniently forget that rule?” She was pissing me off so damn much with this fuss of hers, but it wasn’t like I could do much about it. It was a bad idea to fight her with these sort of things, which I would, really, but I wasn’t in any sort of mood to get into a serious fight. She was nasty when she wanted, and I was a little sensitive when it came to getting yelled at. It’s not because I was a real sensitive guy, but the loudness of it really irritated me for some reason. If I could avoid it, I would.

“I’m sorry” I lied, which went against my principles. Not the lying part of it, but the apologizing part. So many people say that they’re sorry when they’re not. I hate that. If a person does something, he should own up to it instead of getting passed his actions by three fucking words. Three fucking words don’t do anything to fix shit. Three fucking words. 

“It’s fine this time, but going forwards I want you to follow the rules of my house. You live under my roof, okay?” When she was satisfied that she had thoroughly scolded me, which I will spare you by not writing it, she retreated back into her room. I got to finish my sandwich.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know the subject of this is a little random and incoherent with the rest of this, but Tommy isn't the best at staying on topic.


	4. Chapter 4

I realized that it looks like I’m writing this for someone, which I didn’t intend. I just sort of write like that sometimes because it makes things more interesting. When I’m telling a story, I want to tell it to people, you know? Not just write it for me, because I never understood writing something for myself. I’m not a narcissist or so self-engulfed that I’m fascinated with myself in a weird way, like the sort of narcissist who writes an autobiography. I guess it would make sense to decide who I’m writing this for. I would just go ahead and write this for Billy, but I already talked about him like he’s a part of this story. So Theodore Rufus Altman, congratulations, this story is for you. I doubt you will want to read this. I doubt I will ever show this to you, but I will keep you in mind while writing this. You would be disappointed in my story, but maybe you’ll be able to understand where I came from so you don’t hate me as much now. This is so fucking stupid. Sorry Teddy. You should tell Billy that this whole writing therapy thing isn’t doing anything for me. But Billy “my mom is a psychiatrist, so so am I” Kaplan wouldn’t listen to you even if you tried. Anyway, I should continue the narrative or something or maybe even talk about my feelings like Billy said. I think I should get back to writing about juvie or something. I don’t know why I wrote about the bike and the sandwich, because its a real stupid thing to talk about. I guess that’s symbolic of me, anyway. I never know what’s important or not, and I never know what to talk about. That’s why I don’t think this is going to work, the whole writing thing. Billy still wants me to do it, though. He read what I wrote. I didn’t tell him he could, but he read it anyway. That’s why I don’t want to write this for Billy, too. I don’t like people who take my shit without asking first. If he had asked, I’d probably have said he could, but he never asked. You’d be okay if Billy did that shit to you, but I guess that’s why you’re dating him. I’ll let you read it, I guess, but my handwriting isn’t any good. I’m sorry. I guess I should really get to the story.

It was the day after I checked into the hotel. I was sitting on the foot of the bed, starting my attention towards the window. The sun wasn’t up yet, but it was so damn difficult to sleep. I think it was around 4:30 in the morning then, and I was feeling all depressed about everything that happened the day before. Anyway, I was staring out that window and thinking about smoking a couple cigarettes, but I was too depressed about everything to do it. My thoughts wandered while sitting in the dark there, and I started to think about giving up on my endeavor and turning around to go home. It was beginning to sounds like a pretty damn good idea, too. I wouldn’t be able to survive long with only a couple hundred bucks, and I’d probably get hungry pretty soon. Everything was so damn expensive. I did contemplate stealing to get by, or getting an under the counter job. I just couldn’t think of any under the counter jobs I could do. I had no drugs, spare my prescription adderall, and I doubt there were any college campuses near by to sell to, and I wasn’t too keen on the idea of sleeping around. The plan I eventually settled on included ditching the hotel, which of course was a given, because the car was sitting in the parking lot, and I had given my real name like an idiot. The person who checked me in asked me, “What name do you want the room to go under”, and I said, “Thomas Shepherd”, like and idiot. I should have given a fake name like “Richard Smith” or something, but that sounds fake, anyway. I should have said “Benjamin Campbell”. One syllable last names are fake sounding, I think. After checking out, I would have to leave the car. I would take a taxi all the way up to New York or to Ohio. Then I’d figure things out as I went. It wouldn’t be too hard, I don’t think. 

After all that thinking, I couldn’t calm my nerves. The elevator ride out of the room made me feel all nauseous because of the glaring light. All hotels have these stupid bright lights that make it feel like it isn’t 4:57 in the morning. I paced around. I think I made some girl nervous. She said “Hey, what’s your problem, kid? What are you doing up this early without your parents?”

She had this nice voice and was pretty young looking in this old kind of way. I think she looked around in her late thirties with all these lines around her eyes, but she was soft and youthful at the same time. I think it was her clothes that made her look young. They were pretty fashionable. 

I don’t like it when strangers talk to me. I never know how to act when they do. With people I know, I can act in a way to make them disarmed or not frustrated with me. I don’t know what new people expect from me. I thought about pretending like I was raving crazy or something so she wouldn’t talk to me anymore, but she looked all motherly and I felt bad about doing something like that. That was a shame, though, because sometimes it was fun to act that way. People are all losing their marbles by acting acceptable and get scared by people who don’t. She was waiting for an answer. If I wanted to not get caught, I couldn't tell her the truth though.

“My parents? Oh. They’re dead.” I lied. I don’t know why I said that, but she looked all nervous like she hurt my feelings or something. I didn't want her to feel bad. “Its okay though. I live with my uncle. My parents died before I remember.”

“Oh that’s terrible! I’m so sorry.” she nearly yelled. I hated her. I hate people who pretend like they care about other people’s lives. She didn’t care, but if she didn’t say something, it would make her feel like a bad person. She had just met me, and now she was caring about my life. Except she wasn’t caring. She was pretending. That made her a bad person. Good people don’t lie about things or pretend to care about people who they only just met. I hate that I can just decide to hate a person so quickly, but I can’t help it sometimes. You can tell how a person is pretty quickly sometimes. 

“It’s okay. It’s not like it’s your fault or anything.” I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. 

The elevator opened at the lobby floor. She walked over to the front desk and I think she was going to check out as well. She had this big suitcase at her side that had a bunch of stickers on it. They weren’t stupid stickers that had names of cities or countries on it. I think they were various animal stickers and a veterinarian one. I don’t know what a veterinarian would be doing to make her check out of a hotel at 5:00 in the morning. Maybe she was a serial killer or something, and she was ditching this place before they found the body. Nobody would suspect a veterinarian. They always suspect surgeons or something. I waited in line behind her, and I started imagining all the murder tools she kept in that suitcase. She had a good alibi. 

She was pretty quick about checking out, and I was checked out in no time. There weren’t any taxis outside, and I didn’t actually know how to call a taxi or anything. I also didn’t have a phone then, so it isn’t like I could get a driving service anyway. I would need to get a ride. The woman from the elevator was outside taking a smoke in the snow. She was standing under a light, and it was a real pretty sight in an artistic sense. Her countenance was illuminated by the light with the darkness of the early morning swelling around her. Her breath fogged up and smoke swam in the air around her with fluttering snow falling through the break in the darkness. The image was pretty. I think anyway.

“Hey!” I shouted, but I felt a little bad about it because she got all startled. I think she thought I was some creepy guy or something. Guys who do that type of thing I hate. “Hey…” I said again, doing a slight jog over to her. I tried to sound less assertive. She visibly relaxed when she noticed it was just the elevator kid, and she stomped out her cigarette. She didn’t want to be a bad example, I think. That was pretty funny to me, because I smoked and she didn’t want to be a bad example. I think she was quite stupid for that, too, anyway. People smoke. Any kid knows that. No amount of hiding it would do any good, and I think kids would smoke just because they want to, anyway. 

“Hey. What are you doing out here this early in the cold without a jacket? You must be freezing!” She said all motherly. Then she started to take off her jacket, but I shook my head.

“It’s fine.” I lied. She put her jacket on me anyway. It was this pink jacket, which looked pretty funny on me. I didn’t have a jacket because it was in my bag and I thought I would be getting into a car anyway. “Alright. Thanks. For the jacket, I mean. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.” She looked at me all curious and she nodded slowly.

“Sure thing, what is it?” She said.

“Well…” I started, getting all nervous over my words. The first thought that came to mind is that if I got in the car with her, maybe I’d be her next victim or something. As depressed as I was feeling, I hated the idea of dying and not being found. Or being probed in a forensic office. I didn’t want them to have to figure out my identity or some shit like that. The second thing that came to mind is that I couldn’t think of any good lies. When ever it really didn’t matter for anything, I could lie like nothing. I really could. I was a good lair when it meant nothing. Half of every goddamn thing I said was a lie. If someone asks me for my name or something like that, I rarely say Tommy, for instance. That’s why I said my real name in the hotel, because I can’t actually lie well under pressure. When it's something that really matters, my mind always turned to mush. I hated it. I could never lie when it really meant something. I decided to tell the truth, which I regretted later. “The truth is, my parents aren’t dead,” she looked all startled when I said that, and a little bit confused. I don’t think she knew where this was going. “I ran away from home, the truth is. I need a ride out of the state. Well, not out of the state. Just away from here. I stole my moms car and I can’t be caught with it, truth is. I want you to give me a ride. I mean. Please?” 

She digested the information, nodding as I spoke. She looked concerned, and she pulled out her phone. “I don’t think I can do that. I’m sorry. I can call someone who can help you though. What’s your name, kid?” 

“Benjamin Campbell” I lied. If she was going to call the police, I couldn’t have her know my real name. I’d let her do that. Call the police. I’d leave before they showed up. I’d leave in the car if I had to. And if she really did kill someone, it would only make her a suspect if she called the police.

“Alright, you probably don’t want to talk to your parents, but that’s the best thing you can do right now. They love you, you know that? And they’re probably worried sick right now. You probably think that whatever happened is the biggest thing in the world, but you’re young and you don’t know much about life yet. You don’t want to hear this, but your parents have lived longer than you and they know a lot more than you. What happened, anyway, did they ground you or something?” 

I almost laughed. She didn’t know a goddamn thing about my life, and she already assumed I was being a moron about things. I hate it when people do that. I mean, I do hate when people assume things about others, but I don’t mean that this time. I hate it when adults try to tell me that my parents are holy saints or something like that. My dad beat me, and now my mom too, for Christ's sake, and to her I was being irrational for running away. I hate how all these teenagers are always complaining about stupid thing just to make me look bad when I try to complain about real things. I was livid, and I think I was getting all obvious about it too. Sometimes I’m not very good at expressing myself, but when I’m mad I start to breath all heavy. “Yeah,” I breathed out, not wanting to get into things with this woman, “I was hit by my mom, but it’s my fault for making a fuss over it. Thanks for the help. And if you don’t believe me, go ahead and look right here on my cheek.” I turned my head to the side so she could see it, and she gasped, looking all apologetic all of a sudden. I hated that. I didn’t need her pity. 

“Alright. Benjamin, I’m going to call the police and we can figure things out from there.Why don’t we wait in the lobby or something? Where’d you run from? Do you live in the area?” She started asking all these questions, and I didn’t know what she wanted me to answer first. I probably would have found it hysterical that she called me Benjamin, but the possibility of the police showing up stressed me out so goddamn much. I didn’t want my mom to get arrested, so if I was questioned I’d tell them I made it up. The foster system was brutal, and I knew that from experience. I’d have rather dealt with her than deal with another drunk and explosive man. Not to sound sexist or anything, but women aren’t as hard to deal with than men when they’re violent. Woman violence is different. 

“I was lying about being hit. I was also lying about my name. I’m Tommy. My mom didn’t hit me please don’t call the cops. Please. I don’t want her to go to jail. Please” I started to cry, which I wish I hadn’t. At this point, the poor woman didn’t know what to do with me. I think she called the police, but I don’t remember. I think I curled up on the floor and I was still crying. All the stress had just been building and building until it was too overwhelming. The police showed up and they wanted to know what happened, but I couldn't be bothered to answer them. I think I was having a panic attack. They took me to the station, but they didn’t put any handcuffs on me or anything. That’s how I got arrested anyway. I told them I made up being hit and I had done it to myself. I admitted to stealing the car, so I never had to go to court. The minimum time for stealing a car was 18 months, so that’s how long I was in Juvie for. They cut me some slack with the charge, I think. I was charged with a fourth-degree crime because I intended to return the car afterwards. Otherwise it would have been a 5 to 10 year sentence. I don’t think they would have given that to me anyway, being a child and all. They later decided that the sentence was excessive, and they lowered it to 9 month because I was only 13. That’s how I got arrested.


	5. Chapter 5

Lisa didn’t like me much at first. When we met, I had been serving time for about four months already. It was the worst four months of my life, to be entirely honest. Well, the worst four months of my life until the last time I went to juvie. I’ll get to that later. I hate to complain, because I know how annoying it can get, but trust me when I say you don’t want to go to juvie. You grow up fast in there. Within just the first few months, it really fucks people up. There’s this empty look that everyone has. I don’t know how to explain it. 

We all had to leave our cells at 7:00 for breakfast. They were tiny, our cells; 10x10 and we each had a roommate. The guys did, atleast. There weren’t enough girls for them to start doubling up, and I was of course jealous of that. Our beds were cement with these thin mattresses that didn’t do too well on hiding the fact that we were sleeping on cement. It takes a couple weeks to get used to sleeping there, which was not at all the fault of the mattresses. If you knew the type of people that were there, you wouldn’t sleep either. My roommate couldn’t sleep in my company just as well as he made me nervous as hell. I used to think that old saying about sleeping with one eye open was stupid until I had to fucking do it. You had these rules they gave you, and they made you memorize them. After you memorized them, you were allowed to read actual books during rec time. One of the rules said you weren’t supposed to talk about why you were there. I didn’t know what the hell my roommate was in there for, which made it even more frightening to sleep. They weren’t supposed to double up people in there for murder, but for fucks sake, the guy could have been a rapist or something. I think that’s worse than murder, because it traumatizes people for the rest of their lives.

It wasn’t all bad, though. It was all bad, but the people weren’t all bad, is what I mean. I met some of the greatest people in the world there. They just had fucked up homes or they were just mentally ill in a system that hates them. That’s not to say there wasn’t a girl who threw a nurse’s head into a wall one day. You get to see some shit. 

Anyway, breakfast was at 7:00 in this large cafeteria that we ate in. I had expected the food to be awful, but it honestly wasn’t too bad. For breakfast, we had cereal, oatmeal, a piece of bread, and orange juice to drink. I had withdrawal from my coffee addiction the first week, which of course wasn’t taken seriously. I fought hard to get coffee, which deemed me to be uncooperative. I already told you what happened to uncooperative kids. Meals were some of the only times girls and guys were allowed to be in the same room. That and classes. 

Lisa was sitting by herself the first day. There were hundreds of kids, so it was hard to keep track of who was new and who wasn’t, but there weren’t many girls. That’s why I knew she was new. I sat down next to her, because I hated the guys who tried to be my friends. They were all loud and stupid and got into way too much trouble. When I do things, I don’t like to get caught. I think these guys liked the attention or something. One guy hid a spork in his underwear and tried to stab his roommate is what I heard. He was detained in solitary for 48 hours, and he was now sitting with everyone as if he wouldn’t do that shit again. That’s why I was sitting with Lisa, anyway. Girls don’t do stupid shit as much. I’d bet money that most of the girls were in there for drugs or robbery. 

She didn’t say anything to me, and I started to feel a little bad. The thought crossed my mind that maybe she thought I was some pervert or something, and I didn’t intend for her to get that idea about me. I slouched a little, trying to look a little less intimidating. “Wassup?” I asked, shoving a bite of toast in my mouth. It was a bad idea to leave any food on your tray, so I was scarfing the shit down. She was being more tentative about her eating habits. She was tearing her bread into little pieces with her hands. I knew she was a nervous person because of that. Either that, or she was a sociopath. Sometimes you can tell that sort of thing by a person's habits.

“I thought that by sitting alone, people’d get the hint that I want to be alone. You retarded or something?” I hate that word, by the way. I didn’t correct her, because people hate it when I correct them. It’s not a nice word to use, I don’t think, because of learning disabilities and whatnot. I’ve got those. I don’t hold it against her, though. A lot of people use that word not really knowing the implications. 

“I guess I could be considered that. Wassup?” She didn’t like my response, I don’t think. She stood up and began surveying the room for what I assumed to be an empty table, which was hard to come by. The place was crowded, which is depressing if you think about what that means. I assume she couldn’t find one, because she sat back down, tray and all.

“Will you shut up if I give you an answer? I don’t fucking know, they sky?” She had this aggressive italian-american accent that I assumed would be less aggressive elsewhere. I didn’t blame her for her persona, though. I think everyone has this idea of how they’re supposed to act in juvie. I was kind of a tough kind of guy when I first came in. They beat that shit out of you real quick. They had this visions statement that they were going to rehabilitate all the troubled kids or something. I didn’t know how sucking the soul out of people was going to do that. If Lisa didn’t knock her act off, they’d do everything in their power to suck the soul out of her. I was hoping to get her to relax some, but I wasn’t going to achieve that by annoying the shit out of her, as fun as that’d be. 

“Sorry for being friendly.” I said, all glib and stuff. I couldn’t help it sometimes. Conversations bored the hell out of me. “I’ll just sit here and shut up, so you won’t be alone, ya know?” I offered her another glib smile, and I don’t think she appreciated that too much. I think I have a nice looking smile, anyway, if that counts for anything. I continued eating, but I was tearing apart my bread now. I had read somewhere that people like you better if you mirror them. I think that's true, anyway. People are selfish and they like to see themselves in others. I do that a lot. Mirror people, I mean. For instance, I noticed that Kate laughs when she’s nervous, and sometimes she rubs her sleeve between her pointer finger and her thumb when she’s wearing longer sleeves. I started doing that shit, and other things too, and I think she likes me better now. Maybe it’s a stretch. I don’t think most people like the idea of subtly training people to like you, but most people do it anyway. They do it through feigning interest in other’s lives. If someone's boring, I’ll tell them. That’s the only difference, I guess.

“I appreciate it.” She said all glib like, too. I decided then that I liked her. She was as fake as everyone else in the goddamn world, but at least she was entertaining. I did that, then. I sat there and ate so she wouldn’t be alone. I didn’t truly give a damn if she was alone or not, but I let off that I was. I sat there all quiet until 7:30 when we had to leave for our cells. I said “goodbye” to her, and she said it back. This pleased me some, because it meant that there was room for a friendship. And if not a friendship, then at least some twisted version of indifference. I could do indifference. 

When I got back to my cell, Austin was already there waiting for me. He was a tall sort of guy, but everyone looked tall next to me. I hated that more than anything. My height had always been one of my biggest insecurities. It’s real hard to be intimidating when you’re short, and any real important argument looks comedic when a short person’s doing it. I can’t yell or anything like that. People also don’t take me seriously when I want to pick a fight. I like doing that sometimes, just because it isn’t boring. I’m really good at fighting, but no one ever takes me seriously. Once I broke some 5’11” guys nose when I was in ninth grade. He had me in this hold, which was very easy to break out of. I elbowed him in the nose and blood got everywhere. He started cussing at me, and I had really pissed him off. He started trying to lay some hits in me, and because I’m short I could avoid every one. I won that fight, easy. I was at one of those schools that didn’t really care if a person gets into a fight. Sure, they’ll pretend like they care, because they’re supposed to, but they weren’t too strict about it or anything. The most they’d do is they’d make you write an apology note and serve about a month of detention. Detention wasn’t so bad, to be honest. It meant I didn’t have to spend time with the morons who didn’t get into fights or get detention. 

You had to be careful about picking fights in juvie though. A lot of people did it, anyway. They’d lock you up in that stupid padded room for an ungodly amount of time. I’d have picked a lot more fights, I think, but it was more trouble than it was worth. The people were so damn insufferable. You’d have wanted to punch all of their sorry faces, too. Austin was the kind of guy who’d pick a fight. He never threw punches or anything, but he had this chip on his shoulder and he wanted everyone to know. He was the kind of guy who yelled at everyone for everything. If he was trying to read or something, and you stood in his light or something small like that, he’d spend around 20 hours yelling at you about it. I didn’t know a book in the whole damn world worth that much of a fuss. For such a hot-headed guy, he seemed to do a lot of reading. Mostly quiet people do reading, but a lot of scary people do it, too. All those serial killer were prolific readers, you know? They read stuff like ‘Catcher in the Rye’ or ‘Animal Farm’ and twist them from what they were intended for to justify themselves killing. They like psychological books, serial killer do. I didn’t think Austin was going to be a serial killer or anything like that, but he was certainly the type of person who I wouldn’t be too surprised to see on the news for murder. I thought maybe I’d turn the t.v. on and see that he shot his family or something for standing in his reading light. All 3 of his little kids, two little girls and a boy, and his wife, too. He’d even have shot the dog. His wife probably would know it was bound to happen, too. He’d be a drunk, and he’d spend all their money on it and everything. He’d treat her like shit, and she’d cry about it and everything, but she wouldn’t get a divorce because she was Catholic or something. She’d try and run away one day, and that’s when he’d do it. Kill the kids and everything. I mean, you should have seen how the guy made his bed. He couldn’t leave the room if there were any lines or anything in the sheets. All the sheets weren’t ironed or anything like that, so the guy spent a near century making the damn thing. Someone that angry shouldn’t be so damn meticulous about that sort of thing. It’s not like it was his bed or anything like that. That’s why I thought he was going to be a serial killer. 

He was even reading when I came in. They were very particular with what books you could read, but he still had one of those serial killer books. He was reading ‘Crime and Punishment’. It’s supposed to be a classic or something. He told me about it a while back, but I wasn’t listening. I was too busy thinking about other things at the time. I think I had been thinking about a movie I had seen a couple months back in school. It was this stupid movie about irish immigration and the potato famine with Tom Cruise or something that we watched in history class. It had really nothing to do with what we were learning in class, but I think our teacher was just sick of teaching us or something.

He was sitting on the one chair we had, which pissed me off a bit. He didn’t even ask if I was going to sit or anything. He just took the chair. I think he just assumed it was his, or maybe the thought of wrinkling his sheets stressed him out too much. I sat down on my bed, and he probably died inside, because my sheets were now all wrinkly. They made us make our beds each morning, by the way. He was a little more than half way through the book, which irritated the hell out of me. It was taking him a damn near-century to finish that thing. We had an hour before class to do whatever we wanted, and he couldn’t even finish that book. I think he’d been reading it for a week at that point. I wouldn't have taken that long. I would have taken 2 or 3 days at most. I sort of looked around the room for a little bit, swinging my legs back and forth or bouncing my knee. I alternated between the two. I couldn’t think of any books worth reading on our small shelf, and we couldn’t have pencils or anything like that, so I couldn’t draw. And for whatever reason, we weren’t allowed to have erasers, either. If I could draw, that’s all I’d be doing. I kind of looked at Austin and grew a sudden curiosity about the book. His face was all pinched up in concentration, and his breath was all short and quiet, like something was exciting him. His eyes darted across the words, and occasionally he’d sound out the word on his lips. As curious as I was, it made me a bit nervous, too. His serial killer mind was already getting ideas.

“What’re you reading” I sort of yelled at him. He never heard you the first time you said it, so you kind of had to yell at him. He yelled at everyone anyway, so he didn’t mind it too much, I don’t think. I kind of liked to yell, too, because the walls were pretty thin, and everyone would be able to hear it. I pissed a lot of people off. I waited around 4 hours and the silence killed me, so I said it again.“What’re you reading?”

“Already told you, Shepherd. Would it kill you to listen the first time?” He didn’t look up from his book at all, and he said it all quietly like he was still focusing on some passage. I hated it when people called me that. Shepherd. It’s condescending as hell and it sounds awful, too. People never call me “Tommy”. It’s always “Shepherd”, and if not, it’s “Thomas”or “young man”. “Young man” is the worst. I especially hated that Austin called me “Shepherd”, because he was only 3 years older than me and not too much more mature. As an afterthought, he kind of added “Just look at the title, anyway,” and he lifted up the book to show me. 

“That’s not what I meant. I know what you’re reading. Crime and punishment, right? I just thought you looked like you’re enjoying it. What’s going on in the book? Something sexy?” I raised my eyebrows suggestively, but he didn’t even look up from his book to see it. 

“What the hell is wrong with you? No.” He looked up from his book and gave me this frustrated look. “Stay out of my business, okay? Maybe you can read it when I’m done if you’re so interested”

“No thanks. I don’t read.” That was of course a lie. I was like that Holden Caulfield quote: “I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot”. I read all the time, but I just hated reading books on someone else’s schedule. I don’t understand how people expect you to enjoy a book if you can’t thoroughly enjoy it. It’s especially the worst if they ask you questions, which I know Austin would. He likes to boast his narcissistic superiority and would of course try to prove that I didn’t really understand the book. Who gave a fuck if I didn’t read the book exactly like him, anyway? I certainly didn’t care if people understood a book differently. That's why books exist, anyway. For people to see themselves in it. Austin continued reading the book, and the room was back to being silent. He didn’t say anything for some time, and I wasn’t sure if that meant he didn’t want to continue this conversation or something. It's kind of hard sitting around waiting for someone to talk, so I started to swing my legs again. “Actually, mind if I do that?” I said all of a sudden, just because I couldn’t bear the silence. I didn’t want to read it or anything, I just needed to talk. He didn’t say anything for a while, so I continued, “Read the book, I mean. Would I be able to read it when you’re done?”

“What? Are you saying something to me, Shepherd?” He asked, letting out a short breath as he looked up from his book again. His movement was sharp, and I could tell it was taking everything he had to not yell at me. Part of me wanted him to. I don’t know why. I was crazy then, I think. I was always trying to get people to yell at me then. I’m crazy, swear to god.

“Don’t fucking call me that. No, I didn’t say anything to you. Get back to your stupid book.” I don’t know why, but my tone got all dark. I was mad at him all of a sudden, and I don’t know why. I was just fucking crazy. I got all broody and I collapsed backward onto my bad. I was feeling all depressed again all of a sudden, so I shut my eyes and sighed. Then I sighed again when Austin didn’t ask me what was wrong. He always got annoyed when I got all broody and ignored it, which I wish he didn’t. Of course, I would never in a million years talk to him about anything, but a small part of me wished he cared enough to ask, as stupid as that sounds. I’m just crazy sometimes. I don’t know how I knew, but I could feel his eyes on me. In about 5 hours he stopped staring and got back to his book, which then I could relax a little. I was so tense every time some guy stared at me like that.

It was silent again, and I started to squirm under the pressure of...I don’t know, nothing? I hated it when it was quiet. My mind got all racey and my thoughts always turned sour. I would always think about death or stuff like that. I don’t know why, but sometimes that sort of thing scared me. Sometimes it didn’t, but I don’t want to get into that. It got too loud and unbearable, the silence did. “Hey,” I said, sort of just to hear my own voice so it wasn’t so damn quiet.

“Fucking hell. What do you want now?” His voice raised, and he kind of stood up with this elevated tension. The book was now discarded on the chair where he was previously sitting. I got all nervous all of a sudden, and I sat up to look at him, but my eyes quickly dropped.

“Jesus Christ, what are you yelling at me for? I just wanted to ask if you were enjoying your book” I wanted to come off as confident, and if not that, at least I wanted to sound pissed off. My voice came out all shaky and quiet, and I hate myself for that. I was so weak then, because I couldn’t even sound angry when I wanted to. I couldn’t even look people in the eye most of the time, and especially not when they were yelling at me. When people yell at me, my entire body tenses up like the person’s going to fucking hit me. I was an idiot. Nobody was going to hit me, but my mind was convinced that they were for some reason. I was crazy. 

“How am I supposed to enjoy my book with you being so fucking loud. You’re the one who’s yelling, anyway” I wasn’t yelling, and for some reason, Austin was no longer yelling, either. He sat back down all slowly, his eyes glancing over towards me as if there was something wrong with me. “You okay, Shepherd?”

“Nevermind it, then. Don’t answer my question. I don’t even care if you like your book or not” I sort of snapped at him. I was just so pissed off at him for pretending like he was a saint for asking me if I was okay. I hate it when people ask me that sort of thing, and I especially hate it when people pretend like they care even though they were just through scolding me. I kind of wanted to sleep before class started, but at that point I probably only had 30 seconds left anyway. It felt like 5 hours. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t get myself to sleep. I felt Austin’s eyes on me like some sort of disease, the pervert. I wished he’d stop staring at me.

“Hey, uh, Tommy,” he said all quietly. I heard him close his book and shift in his seat. He was still boring his eyes into me. I wanted to cry. My chest got all tight, and I started to shake. I don’t even know why. It took everything I had not to start crying, and I’m glad I didn’t then. I would have been loud if I cried then. I think Austin would have liked to see me cry. He continued, “If you ever need to talk or anything… You know? I’m here.” He struggled to get the words out, because he was a guy and guys aren’t allowed to talk about those things. I ignored him, but I think he knew that I heard him. I kind of threw my head under a pillow, because at that point I was crying and I didn’t want him to hear it. I don’t even know why. I was quiet, and I’d bet all my money that he didn’t know I was crying. I was good at doing that without people knowing. I don’t cry a lot or anything like that, but at a young age I had to learn to bottle up my emotions or risk an explosive reaction from my dad. Nobody wanted to know how I thought about things, and nobody wanted to see me cry.

This went on for about 8 hours. The crying, I mean. I hate that I was so weak and that somebody asking me if I was okay made me cry, but it was a lot then, okay? I wasn’t okay, and I just didn’t even know where to begin with that. I didn’t even have a fucking clue why I wasn’t okay. I bit my fingernails to try to stop crying, but I had already bitten them too close to the finger, so I kind of just chewed on the skin there until my fingers were raw and a little bloody.

At 8:30 we went to school, and I can't say much happened there. Even if something did happen, I couldn’t have been bothered to pay attention. Anyway, that was my day. After class there was rec time, and there was lunch and dinner and stuff. That’s all I really have the energy to write for today.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: attempted suicide; intentional overdose; homophobia

Sometimes, I can be a pretty awful person. I don’t mean to be, but I have a hard time weighing out the consequences of my actions. I’ll be in a situation and I’ll act, and I very rarely ever think about that. I just do. This gets me in a lot of trouble sometimes, or I just seem like an ass. I don’t mean to. I really don't. I wish that I was better with decision making. I don’t like being a bad person or anything, even though I think Eli thinks that I do. Billy “my mom is a psychiatrist, so so am I” Kaplan (he asked me not to call him that) thinks my bad decisions are because of Borderline Personality Disorder. Mrs. Kaplan doesn’t think I have that. She says it’s my ADHD and limited impulse control. I trust her. She also told Billy to stop diagnosing people, which was pretty funny. How many times do you think he’s done it if Mrs. Kaplan had to tell him—no, remind him—not to do that? He looked pretty upset about everything, too. He’s a pretty funny guy. Anyway, I made a lot of bad decisions in Juvie. It didn’t necessarily harm other people or make me a “bad person”, but it got me into trouble. Here are the four bad decisions that I made. I mean, there were definitely more, but I only want to talk about four of them.

Firstly, I want to say that I didn’t hate Austin. I really liked the guy, honest, but at that point I hated him and I don’t know why. It just kind of happened that way. That happens a lot sometimes where I just kind of start hating a person who I really like. I can’t like a person unless I hate them. I was in some kind of bad mood, and I had decided that I no longer wanted a roommate. They of course would not have listened if I asked them to room me by myself, unless I was deemed a danger to others. I wasn’t a violent person, so that was out of the question. I had thought a great deal about what I could do, and my solution seemed to be perfect. I was going to tell them that I was gay. That was the first really bad decision. 

At that point in time, I was completely in denial about my sexuality and everything in that area. I was straight, or at least I figured I was. My parents weren’t exactly homophobic or anything, at least I never engaged in those topics with them, but that was exactly the problem. They never talked about it, so I didn’t know that being bisexual was something I could do. The only things I ever heard anything about was straight and gay, and being straight made more sense to me. Being straight was safe. I’ll bet you always knew you were gay. You and Billy are the epitome of gay, anyway. I’m digressing again.

I told the staff I was gay, and they swiftly changed the rooming arrangement as if I’d be sleeping with Austin then and not before. Austin was confused about everything, because I don’t think they told them why I was leaving his room. I had started packing up my things, and he put down his book to ask me what the hell I was doing. He was no longer reading Crime and Punishment, but The Alchemist. I liked that book. Anyway, he asked “What the hell are you doing, Shepherd?”

“Nothing, don’t worry about it.” I said in between packing my clothes. I scoffed at that. Shepherd. This answer hadn’t satisfied him. Nothing ever did. I continued to pack things up, but he didn’t continue to read. He put the book down, which meant he intended to get in my business. He was always so nosy.

“Yeah? Looks like you’re getting out of here. Lucky bastard.” He looked almost happy for me, but I think he was beginning to realize he’d be losing a friend. It was kind of weird like that in here. People were always happy, yet strangely never happy when people left that place. When people were released, there was a whole ceremony out of it. There were tears (mostly from the girls) and hugs-goodbye and we’d have people make promises for us so that they’d experience things in freedom for us. It was almost like the person was going to the afterlife or something, and Austin was probably mourning my death. Actually, it was more like Prison existed in another reality, and we were travelling to another dimension entirely. Have you read Girl, Interrupted? Anyway, I kinda felt bad for hating him at the moment, and I kinda felt bad that he assumed I was getting out of there. I don’t know.

I paused, turning to face him. He looked sad. “I’m not leaving this place, so don’t cry now.” This answer didn’t seem to satisfy him either, because now his expression turned to confusion. 

“Yeah? What the hell are you doing then?” He was now picking up the last shirt in my drawer and putting it in the bag I had. My entire body tensed, and I silently willed him to get out of my personal space. My hopeful psychic-powers didn’t work. I didn’t think they would. Part of me wanted to yell at him or launch myself at him, but that was only a small part. Like an intrusive thought. I was crazy. “You aren’t going to solitary or a mental place or something, right?” 

“Why the hell does it matter to you? Just fucking get over it. It’s none of your business.” I didn’t mean to come off so rude, it just kinda happened. I hated that I said it like that. He sighed, his body slumping in defeat, and moved back to his—our—chair to continue his book. I wasn’t mad at him for that. I knew I was hard to deal with. Every time we got a little bit closer, I got all defensive and snappy. 

“You’re going to find yourself pretty alone someday, and you’ll just have yourself to blame.” he breathed out in a staccato, sing-song, meant-for-himself-voice. His finger reached for a page, and he dramatically turned it. He knew I was watching him, and he wanted me to know that he knew I heard him. That’s why he turned the page like that. We had a strange relationship. He was too damn proud of himself. I hated him.

“And you’re going to be a serial killer or something.” I didn’t quit yell. He laughed at that, which pissed me off. He had laughed at me. I don’t know why that bothered me so much, but it did. More than anything, really. I wanted to cry. Everything was just so overwhelming all of a sudden. My entire body shook with emotion. I can’t even pinpoint what emotion, not even now, but I feel it a lot. I threw something at his head, which it turned to only be a sock-ball. It missed his head and hit the wall with a pathetic thump. I wished it was something heavier. He laughed again. My hand reached for a book without me telling it to. It was now gripped tightly in my hand.

“You really think that?” He shook his head, amused. He stood back up, tossing the sock back at me. He did it just to piss me off, I swear. “You’re fucking crazy. Guess you are going to a mental place. Tell me how it is when you’re back.”

I threw it. I don’t know why. I threw it and it hit him square in the chest. He pushed me to the ground next thing I knew, and he was sitting on my chest holding my arms down with his hands. I started to thrash about as an attempt to get him off, but he shifted his weight so that his legs were on mine. I couldn’t move. “Get off of me!” I gasped, barely able to breath with him on me. I started to squirm again. “Get off of me. Get off of me,” I started repeating.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” He shifted again, so that he had a better hold of me. “You were fine just a second ago. What the hell is going on? Jesus, I hope you get help for whatever problems you’re having.” 

“Get off of me” I freed one of my legs and kicked him in the back. I was apparently more flexible than I thought. “Get off of me. Get off of me. Get off of me.” He complied, and he rolled off of me to sit down next to me. He sat criss-cross with his arms folded over his chest. I was still lying on the floor. “Get off of me.”

“I’m off, Tommy. Calm down. Jesus. Just calm down.” He said, but I was calm. He was off of me, and I was calm. “Just breath.” He’d say a couple times, but I was breathing. I shut my eyes, trying to ignore that he was there. It made me uncomfortable that he was sitting there. My body tensed. The head started to swim and all of my senses ramped up. I couldn’t differentiate my surrounding. It felt like there was a blanket or something covering all of my limbs. There was this eminent pressure covering my body, yet it felt like I was floating. Everything was just so much. There were sounds. I didn’t know what they were. I don’t really know what happened next, but the door of our cell opened, and I was pulled up to my feet. This startled me, and I really didn't mean to, but I elbowed the guy in the gut. I was in the padded room soon after. I don’t remember ever walking there. I think they drugged me.

I don’t think I need to explain the padded room. Every person has seen one in a movie or something. It’s white padded walls with white padded floors and a white padded roof with the only break being the door, which was also padded. There was a window on the door so that someone could look in to check up on me, but it was thick glass and the room was sound-proofed. There wasn’t any straight-jacket. I’m glad about that. 

I spent an ungodly amount of time in there. There was nothing to do, and I swear every minute in there turned a person a little more crazy. That’s why I didn’t understand why people even had padded rooms in mental places. I know this wasn’t one, but padded rooms or solitary just made a person crazier. It made me crazier. I got really bored and started to talk to myself for a bit. It wasn’t that I was hearing voices, it was just that I wasn’t. I needed to hear something. I don’t know if that makes sense. I pinched my arms until they bled. If it was a mental place, they would have cared, but since it was prison, they didn’t even talk to me about it. They saw my arms bleeding, I know they did, but there was no attempt to even bandage it or anything. They just brought me back to a new room with no roommate after my time was up in the padded room.

My new room was the same as the old room. Two concrete beds with mattresses, two small desks, and two chairs this time. I laughed a bit at that, because this room had two chairs for one person, and my last room had one chair for two people. I think that’s symbolic of the inefficiency and lack of care in prison in general. I think the guard really did think I was crazy, because I just started laughing for no reason. But it wasn’t for no reason. He shut the door on me, and I lied back on my bed, now completely alone again. That’s why that was a bad decision. I think you can infer what being alone does to my mentality.

I saw Austin again next time we had rec time in the TV room. Everyone was sitting down in the fold-out chairs in front of the screen. The shit they had us watch was awful. It had to be pg, so the only movies we had were Finding Nemo, Star Wars: A New Hope, and Despicable me. We cycled through those movies not by choice. I hate minions. I fucking hate minions. We could also watch stuff on Cartoon Network sometimes. That was pretty hit-or-miss, because there were the low-tier children's shows, and the still-bad-but-not-as-bad preteen stuff like Star Wars the Clone Wars and Teen Titans.

Anyway, I sat down to join them, but apparently I wasn’t even allowed to do that anymore. Apparently I was sitting too close to other people, because some staff monitoring us barged over and physically moved my chair away from the other kids. “You sit here” He asserted, giving me an authoritarian stern look. 

“What? Why? Everyone else is over there.” I glanced back at the other teens, who were now staring at the scene rather than the stupid show. The started talking to each other, but I didn’t hear what they were saying. They didn’t want me to. Austin started the conversation. The staff looked shocked that I questioned his authority. They hated that. They wanted people to take everything they said as law. He contemplated a second whether or not to justify himself, and the expectant air of everyone tipped him to explain.

“We need to be sure that you won’t be inappropriate to the other boys. You need to give them personal space.” That’s all the clarification he gave, because he returned to his post by the door. His attention was now primarily on me. I was livid. They were trying to isolate me. That was emotional abuse. It wasn’t just then, and their game would continue throughout the rest of my time, but I’m not going to go into that. The other teens were still staring at me, until one of them chimed up with nonverbal permission from the other boys.

“Are you a fag?” asked Jack, some asshole with a lot of acne. Everyone thought it was hilarious that he asked this, because there were several suppressed laughs from the other kids. Austin didn’t laugh, thankfully. He looked down, and then back at the TV.

“No, I’m not a fucking fag. You know, people in the closet usually project on others. I support you, Jack. Its okay if you’re gay” Though not the best thing I could have said, but it was the safest option. I couldn’t admit to being gay(I didn’t even know I was bi), because I wasn’t and that was a death sentence. If I straight-out denied it, nobody would believe me. I had to shift the attention in a nonchalant way. They approved of my quip, and started to tease Jack a bit. I was safe then, but the persistence to isolate me by the staff would eventually work. Everyone started teasing me about it, sometimes outright physically, and the only guy that would talk to me was Austin. That lead to my second bad decision. 

I lost my virginity to Lisa to prove I wasn’t gay(it didn’t work), but I’m not going to write about that. You’re going to read this, and that would just be awkward, and it would probably be considered child pornography. So that’s all I have to say about the second bad decision.

The third bad decision I made got me out of Juvie. It was a win-lose kind of situation. I forget when, but as some point I was diagnosed with insomnia. They started giving me sleeping medication in junction with my adderall, which my mom didn’t consent to me taking. They just gave that shit to me to get me under control. I started tonguing the sleeping meds and I took fifty of them at once. It took a long time to collect them, and I’m honestly surprised they didn’t figure out my plan. 

Anyway, I was sitting in my room on the edge of my bed. It was probably around twelve at night, but it really was hard to tell because they had the lights on in our cells 24/7. That was one of the hardest things to readjust to. Sleeping in the dark. At the time, I had a depressive episode that lasted a couple months. It started around three months into my sentence, and at that point I had served almost six. At that point, I hadn’t gotten my sentenced lowered, so it was a whole year left. I figured I’d be better dead than have to spend another year being emotionally abused and isolated. I opened up the drawer I was hiding them in(under one of my shirts), and I held all fifty four of them in my hand. It took a lot of courage to actually take them, and it took even more not to tell anyone after I took them. Apparently I lacked that courage. I decided to wait until morning so that if I did regret my decision, I could tell someone at breakfast. Or the staff would see me passed out on my bed. I figured the sleeping meds wouldn’t do enough on their own, so I took the makeshift prison knife I stole off of someone that I was also hiding in my drawer, and I’d slit my wrists with it. 

I don’t know what it really is like to be suicidal. I have been suicidal, most of my life actually, but I would never actually kill myself. My attempt at suicide was more about my situation and not about my self-loathing, so I guess that makes it different. I also didn’t really want to die. I thought I did, but I didn’t. I panicked the moment I shoved the pills down my throat. I had them all lined up on my bed, and I took them one by one. I even got through all of them before I freaked out. I think giving myself the task of swallowing each one and counting them out distracted me enough, but in a moment I was shoving my fingers down my throat to try to get myself to purge the pills. I learned the hard way that I didn’t have a gag reflex. I didn’t even get to slitting my wrists. The struggle was short lived, because after the nausea stage of overdose, I was passed out on the floor. I woke up some time later, barely able to discern my surroundings.

There was this blaring pain behind my eyes, and I had this terribly sick feeling in my limbs and head. I couldn’t move my arm. I could barely move my left arm, but my right arm couldn't move at all. I struggled in vain to open my eyes a while, and when I finally did, I shoved them closed again. The light hurt so damn much. When I could finally start to hear again, the sounds of doors opening and closing, staff rushing through the halls in urgency with low hushed voices and codes, and the antiseptic smell told me I was in a hospital. Not the medical part of Juvie, but an actual hospital. I was free. I tried to sit up, but I was starkly reminded that I was not free by the handcuff on my right wrist. I pulled at the restraint a couple time, just testing. My eyes fluttered open, and I noticed I was connected to an IV drip of some sort. I was alive. I let out a breath of relief, but I couldn’t relax. I had no idea what was going to happen next. Were they going to take me back to Juvie now that I was awake? Would they tell my mom what happened? My dad(I hoped not)? Would I get to see my mom? I let these questions and scenarios swim around my mind. My vision was shifting in and out of focus, and it took a lot of energy to stay awake. The thoughts helped me focus enough to remain conscious. When the dizziness faded, I was able to take in my surroundings better. The room was empty except for the equipment, me, and nurse sitting in a chair that I didn’t notice initially. I jumped upon seeing her. She didn’t notice I was awake yet. She was sitting on her phone. How professional, I thought. She was probably a sitter. That’s a nurse who has to watch a suicidal patient so they don’t kill themselves. I wonder what she thought about me. 

I tried to talk to her, but my voice failed and came out raspy and weak. I tried again before she could talk. She was going to say something. “Why am I here?” I said in a voice I barely recognized. My throat burned when I spoke, probably from the gastric suction. The tube is pushed down the throat, right? I don’t know. 

She sat up in the chair, giving me her full attention. And she did look attentive. “You overdosed. But you’re okay now. You’re okay. How are you feeling?”

“Emotionally or physically” I joked, but it hurt to laugh. I coughed instead, but I couldn’t cover my mouth with my arm. I tried to, but with the wrong arm because I’m an idiot. I only worked to remind myself--and the nurse--of the handcuff. And that I was incarcerated. And potentially violent. I wasn’t violent. She didn’t seem to mind that I was handcuffed though. Her demeanor didn’t change, I mean. I had no way of telling what she was really thinking. She was probably scared of me. I don’t know. She stood up to stand next to my hospital bed with a clipboard in her hand. 

“If you could talk about both, I’d love to listen. But how are you physically feeling first? On a scale from one to ten, one being no pain and ten being the worst pain imaginable.”

That was a hard question to answer. I started imagining the worst pain. I think that would be someone peeling off my skin or being vivisected without anesthetic. If that’s a ten, then most other pain would be around a two or three. Since I certainly wasn’t being vivesected, I said “Two. I think.”

“You think?” She clarified, pausing from writing that down.

“Two.” 

She still didn’t write that down. “Can you explain your pain to me?” She said instead.

“Well, I’ve got this awful headache and I’m nauseous. I can’t feel my limbs and talking really, really hurts. Light hurts. Sounds hurts. Everything hurts. I don’t know.” I tried to explain, so she’d have something detailed to put down. She quirked an eyebrow, and wrote that down.

“But you said you’re only at a two?” She clarified again in a confused kind of way.

“Yeah. I’m not being vivisected. That’d be a ten. This is nothing compared to that, so I’m at a two.”

“Okay. Is your pain all you can think about or is it preventing you from moving?”

“Yes. Both.”

She finally started to write things down, satisfied with my answer. She moved her chair from the edge of the room so it was next to my bed, and she sat down. She put her clipboard down and folded her hands on her lap. “How are you emotionally? You don’t have to talk about anything if you don’t want, but I care about you, and I care about how you’re feeling.” I usually had a problem when people said stuff like that, but she was the first person who ever seemed genuine. She actually cared about me, and she probably cared about every patient she saw. She was probably hurt by her patients pain. I started feeling all sad, because what was I doing? I was an awful person. 

“I’m fine. I think. I don’t know. I don’t know why I did it. I’m sorry. I don’t know.” I started to pick at a spot on my hand with my fingernails, and she grabbed my hand and held it so I’d stop. Not in an aggressive way or anything. I relaxed for the first time since I woke up. I looked down at my hand, and for some reason it made me all depressed again. I felt empty and awful. “I’m sorry” I almost yelled, because I felt like a pathetic excuse for a person, “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t apologizing to anyone in particular. I just had to say it to for some reason. I notably tensed up again, and the nurse squeezed my hand. My ears started to ring and the every sound became overwhelming. I could hear all the tones and frequencies of every sound and all of them came in and out of focus at the same time. All the layers. I needed to cover my ears, by one of my hands was occupied by the nurse and the other was in a cuff. The nurse started talking to me, but I could barely make it out. It hurt. Her talking.

I think she said “It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize. You’re here now…” I couldn’t catch the rest of it. 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry….” I started to have a panic attack that I can barely remember, and a doctor came in and dosed me up on something. I was asleep again.

They decided to send me to a mental hospital, and my mom fought to have the rest of my sentence there instead of juvie. The appellate court agreed, and that’s when they lowered my sentence. I never saw my friends from juvie again, because I never went back.

The last bad decision was not getting my friend’s contact information, and I still kind of regret that I never got it. They weren’t bad people for anything, and it’d be cool to talk to them again. Anyway, those were the four bad decisions I made.


	7. Chapter 7

Though definitely an improvement, the mental hospital wasn’t as day and night from prison as I’d expected it to be. With all the books I read, albeit most of them taking place in the 50s or 60s, and how movies portrayed mental hospitals, I expected it to be a living hell. It wasn’t. You still had a room that could be locked (it never was) where you spent x amount of time until y activity etc. I mean, you were technically there against your will, but people mostly treated you with pity where as people treated you with authoritarianism in prison. And the “prisoners” were nicer too. Anyone who’s been to a mental hospital knows the two kinds of people. “Group A” people and “Group B” people. Actually, we’ll call it “Group Z” people, since the two categories were starkly different. Group A consisted of the people there for attempted suicide, drug abuse, eating disorders, and minor, depressing things like that. They were mostly quiet at first, but they were the sweetest people. Then there were the people who tried to burn their houses down or tried to murder their two year old foster sibling out of jealousy. That’s group Z and there was no in between. I think I just categorized myself in my own bad grouping. Damn. Does stealing a car warrant group Z? Anyway, you only have one or two Group Z people on the floor at a time. Sometimes it really is just a small mental problem, and they’re pretty cool otherwise. Sometimes you just stay away from them and look away when four or five staff have to physically restrain them to the newly improved padded room. I never had to go there, by the way. Apparently my “panic attacks” didn’t warrant the padded room here like they did in juvie.

Going to a mental hospital is surreal. You have to wait for someone to sign all the paperwork, like your mom, then you have to sign some paperwork agreeing that you won’t buy a gun for ten years. That ruins my latest suicide plan. Don’t take that seriously. It was a joke. Anyway, you’re standing in this small ass waiting room with hospital lighting and there are depressed people everywhere. Just. Standing. Nobody is talking. Then someone gets you and takes you inside. They don’t say anything, and they expect you to follow them. You do, because you’re not sure what the boundaries are yet. You’re not sure what they’d do to you if you didn’t. Everything is all clean, because it’s a hospital, but there isn’t all the movement of a hospital. Its stagnant. And it's late at night, so you’re the only one actually in the hall. But it doesn’t feel like night. The bright ceiling lights blare into your skull as you shuffle through the hall like a prodded cattle in your newly provided flip-flops. They’re too big, and you’re not sure if you can ask for a new size or if the loud, awkward sound should be embarrassing. It is. You know there are other people, you just can’t see them yet. You start wondering what they’re like. Are they crazy? Like really crazy? You begin to wonder if you should be there, or if you should be worried about your safety. You almost expected to hear wails and cries through the night. That’s what you saw in movies anyway. But no one is crying or screaming. No one is talking either. Not even the staff. Then you go to a new room. It isn’t your room, it’s an interrogation room as I called it. They didn’t like that. The room had the same unnaturally white walls and cold-stone floor. Everything about the room was cold, and I started the shiver a little. The clothes I had been wearing didn’t do a good job at keeping me warm.

There was a doctor in there, and she looked all professional and tired. She said “Hello. I’m Dr. Williams. How are you feeling?”

There was another chair, which I assumed was for me, so I collapsed in it. I was pretty tired. “Hi. Uh. I’m fine.” I said. The other staff member left the room, leaving the door closed behind her. My attention shifted towards her, instead of the doctor, and I wondered if I would ever see her again. From the two or three minutes I had been with her, I already developed some kind of strange bond. She was my Charon for passage through this underworld. I was out of my element and completely alone without her.

“You’re fine? And what’s your name?” She asked me, but I was pretty certain she’d have that in her notes. Being a doctor, she had my medical records probably. I answered her, because she was, I assumed, just trying to make me more comfortable. 

“Uh. Tommy? Oh, do you need my full name? Thomas Shepherd.” I stammered, feeling very tired and very awkward under the bright lights. It was so hard to think with them, and I can’t understand how people worked every day in those conditions. There should be labor laws against it or something. 

Dr. Williams smiled, and nodded, like all pediatric doctors do. I hated that. I wasn’t four. She continued, “Okay, Tommy. Can you tell me more about how you’re feeling?”

“God, why does everyone want to ask that all the time? I’m fine.” I kind of just said, still exhausted. I was looking at my hands. I didn’t really want to talk about my feelings. I don’t have them, anyway. I started to drift back to my depressive state, feeling alone and completely foreign to her, but I stifled that feeling. I wouldn’t survive if I couldn’t be strong. I forced myself to face the doctor with the indifference of a Greek statue. I was stone.

“Okay, then why are you here?” I looked up at her, startled by her blantansy until I realized it was probably a protocol question. I didn’t have the energy to talk about that. Didn’t they realize that it would make people all depressed and everything? That’s not something you just ask.

I looked back down at my hands. There was still the little scab from where I was scratching at it. It was still in the wet scab phase and it was pale-pink. Looking at it, I could tell it was going to scar. My stomach got sick thinking about that, because I don’t remember my hand being all that hurt. It looked pretty bad. When did I do that? It took about a minute, but I kind of just mumbled, “Don’t you already have that in your notes?”

“I want to hear it from you.” She coaxed. Her voice was too sweet. Too fake. I hated her. I didn’t want to talk to her.

“If I’m insane or something, how is my word reliable?” She sighed at that, but before she could say anything, I added sarcastically, “The voices in my fucking head told me to do it.”

The conversation went on like this, and she asked me a lot of questions. She really wanted to know why I was there, despite already knowing it. She also asked a lot about self-harm and my family situation and stuff. The other staff came in with food some time in the middle of it, which I devoured. It was awful, but it was better than prison food, so to me it was like a five-star meal. After she was satisfied that she stripped my mind enough, I was taken to a physical evaluation. They checked my weight, which was pretty low. They asked if I had an eating disorder. I lied and said I did. I don’t know why. Then they checked me for weapons. They found the knife I brought with me. I told them it was for self defense, and they took it from me. I didn’t resist. I didn’t know if I could. They also noticed some scars on my arms, and they asked me about that. It was from my pinching. I said it was from heroin. After that, I was given a room. There wasn’t any roommate or anything, but there were two beds and a closet. It was much bigger than the prison room, and for some reason that made me feel really lonely. I let myself miss Austin. I put my bag of street clothes on the floor, since I couldn’t get the closet open, and I silently celebrated the fact that I could wear street clothes. That was my silver lining.

That was the first night in awhile I got some real sleep, and someone had to ruin it by waking me up at five in the morning. They were nice about it, but that doesn't change the fact that they woke me up at an ungodly hour. The sun wasn’t even up yet. He was a guy, which the previous day had me assume everyone who worked there was female. Women were more compassionate to deal with mentally ill teens. Anyway, he apologized for waking me up as an afterthought and handed me a cup. “We need a urine sample from you, and after that, we’re going to draw some blood.” He talked while working, and he added while heading to the door, “I’ll show you where the bathroom is if you’ll come with me.” And he was out of the room.

I lied back down and tried to get back to sleep. He said “if you’ll come with me”, not “when you come with me”. He was back in the room shortly after. I cursed under my breath, rolling over with a pillow over my head. “I need you to get up, Thomas.” I flipped him off. “Please cooperate with me. It won’t take too long, I promise.” His voice was no longer kind, and it had this stern undertone to it. He was standing in the doorway as a kind of indicator that I needed to leave the room. He wasn’t going to play my games and come get me up. Maybe he would have if I continued, but I got out of bed and complied. I didn’t need drugs shot in my ass. I started analyzing the halls as we walked, looking for potential ways to escape. I wasn’t going to escape, but thinking about those sort of things was fun. Sometimes, I have these elaborate plans in my head about random things. This time it was about escaping. I was going to find a loose nail or screw or something in the window, and then I was going to use to stab an artery. Then they’d take me to a real hospital, and I’d escape then. I also thought about stealing a bobby-pin off of a nurses head, which would be hard, but then I would lock-pick one of the doors if they weren’t electronic locks. Anyway, he didn’t say anything else until we got to the restroom, which it was “Here it is”, and then he told me where to bring it when I was done.

The restroom was one large one for the floor of boys to share. There were a couple showers in there, too. Nobody was up yet, which you don’t understand how relieving that was, and I took the sample. I don’t need to explain that, you pervert. 

After that, they took my blood and gave me some juice. It wasn’t too bad. I don’t have a needle-phobia like Billy does. I swear, Billy has a phobia of everything. Needles, spiders, ghosts, crowds, tight spaces, loud noises, people, talking to people, looking at people, being in the same room as people, ordering food from people, himself; everything. What would he do without his emotional support green giant? I’m hilarious. Oh wait! Speaking of Billy, I’m not talking about my feelings! What will I ever do with myself? Right now I feel like Billy needs to get over himself and stop telling me I have problems when he’s obviously the one with problems. I expect to see a feeling journal ASAP. Got that Teddy? He does one if I do one. Maybe it’ll help him get away from his stupid window, anyway. When was the last time he actually went to therapy? When was the last time he actually showered? He smells. Forget it. It’s not my job to do anything for him. If he gets any worse, he gets worse, and he might end up where I was. I don’t think that’d be good on his psyche, so you need to get him to write one of these stupid things. He likes you better than me, so you need to do it. I think he hates me right now. He hasn’t talked to me in a couple days. Come to think of it, I don’t think he’s talked to you much either. Everyone else has continued their lives. He needs to do the same.

Anyway, enough about Billy. He’d be happy about the attention. I’m not feeding into it. And I kind of hate him right now, to be honest. I kind of hate you, too, but you’re bearable. You’re on thin ice, though, Altman. Thin ice.

Getting back to things, I got my blood drawn. There was nothing shocking they found in that. I got to go back to my room after that, but it was short lived. Who does that? Who gives someone the false hope of sleeping in only to tear them from that comfort to a completely asinine situation? You know who does that? Sociopaths. Everyone there was a sociopath. I was once again taken out and brought into the interrogation room. Same two chairs and same blaring light, but the person was different. He was sitting down in the chair across from the one I was supposed to sit in, and he had a clipboard. They all did. He was a taller guy about in his 40s with dark hair and unnaturally green eyes. I couldn’t look at his eyes. 

He motioned for me to sit down with his pen hand. I turned the chair around and sat in it backwards. I’d be lying if I said he started writing stuff down, but I love the image of the psychiatrist writing every small detail down, so he did. He wrote that down. He then introduced himself, “I’m Dr. Vlahos. I’m going to be your psychiatrist. Can you tell me your name and why you’re here?” He asked, taking the cap of his pen off in preparation, because he really hadn’t written anything yet.

“I already told Dr. Williams, just ask her.” I really didn’t understand why the doctors couldn’t communicate with each other. Even if they were on different shifts, they could leave their notes or something. How many times would I have to answer the same four questions?

“Well, I haven’t seen her today. Could you tell me?” He asked, leaning closer in his seat. He crossed one of his legs over the other. That made me nervous, because it seemed like I was some sort of specimen to him. I hated that. I just wanted to leave then, so I hastily said everything he was looking for in one breath.

“Tommy. Attempted suicide. Can I go?”

“Why do you want to go?”

Wasn’t it obvious? “Because it’s four o’clock in the morning and I want to sleep.”

“It’s six.” He reminded me, pointing at a clock on the wall. I thought about lying and saying that I couldn't read clocks. I didn't. He then, in a surprisingly patient manner, reprimanded my haste,“The more time and thought you put into this, the better idea we’ll get as to what’s going on with you. I can’t do everything, so I need you to talk to me. Can we talk?”

His patience was a curse for himself, because it only encouraged me to misbehave. He wouldn't be able to do anything about it. I couldn’t help the smirk. “We are, aren’t we?”

He furrowed his brows, gripped his pen a little tighter, held it over the paper, paused, and decided to write something down. I wondered what he wrote. Between a word or two on the paper, he muttered the protocol: “Have you seen another psychiatrist before, and if so, what have you been diagnosed with?”

I thought for a moment, looking down at my feet. The answer should have came to me, but I was distracted and my attention shifted to the obviously large flip-flops. I got embarrassed for some reason. This guy seemed so professional and I was sitting in a baggy sweatshirt, dirty jeans(Why did my mom bring dirty jeans? I was gone for six months, and she couldn’t be bothered to do the laundry?), and shoes that didn’t even fit. They made we wear socks, too. That was the worst.

“--Tommy” he interrupted my train of thought and I sort of jumped. 

“Uh, yeah, once. It was in second grade. I have ADHD.” He wrote that down.

Once he was done, putting the cap on his pen as if he wouldn’t use it later, he proceeded, “Alright, are you on any medication for that or have you seen any therapists?”

“Yeah. Adderall. And I every time I see a therapist my mom pulls me out once it starts to work. She only likes therapy when it doesn’t work.” It was strange. I vaguely remember therapy. The first therapist I saw was after the first time I went to a mental hospital. I stabbed someone, and since kids as young as I was are generally not sent to Juvie, I was sent to a mental hospital. After that, my mom signed me up for therapy. I was eight, and with the vocabulary I know now, I’d describe her as a Freudian therapist. Everything that was wrong with me was, to a degree, the fault of my parents. I loved that. My parents, not so much. After the first meeting, we never saw her again. I saw another therapist when I was twelve. I had a lot of trouble controlling my emotional impulses, and he recommended punching my pillow and stuff. My therapist also wanted to talk about the divorce and stuff, because it was hard on me. My mom again wasn’t pleased, and I stopped seeing him. That’s my relationship with therapy.

Dr. Vlahos spoke up, inferring from my therapy statement, “So you live with your mom? Do you live with anyone else?”

“No. I don’t see my dad anymore.”

“I’m sorry to hear that--”

“You don’t need to be. I hated him anyway” I didn’t need him feeling sorry for something like that. He should have felt happy for me, you know?

“Can you tell me why?”

“Alcoholic.” I simplified. I was glad he didn’t really ask for more. 

“And your parents are divorced then? Do you like your home life now? How do you and your mom get along?” He asked, and I got visibly overwhelmed. He asked so many fucking questions, and I didn’t know what he wanted me to answer first. My mind couldn’t focus on answering all that at the same time. Every time I thought about one question, I couldn’t focus on that, because I needed to answer the others. I couldn’t even remember the questions by the time I got that far. My eyes fell to my feet, I started to pinch my arm, but I quickly shoved both my hands in my pockets. He didn’t need to see that. I got all panicky, but I swallowed that down. 

I didn’t answer any of his questions. Instead, I got all cynically glib,“Fucking hell. How many questions are you going to ask? How does that even have to do with me being crazy? Just get to the disorders already.”

“We can start talking about your psyche once we talk about your home life. I need to be sure that you’re safe at home.” He said in the pediatric voice. He wrote something down. I didn’t even answer any of his questions, which made me nervous. What was I doing wrong? Was my demeanor, then, just crazy?

I forgot his questions, but I think I had a pretty good understanding of the answers he was looking for, “I’m safe. My mom’s great. I feel emotionally stable. Uh...What else?”

“Alright. You overdosed on sleeping pills. Why did you do that?”

“So you did know! I knew it!” I shot up, nearly jumping out of my seat. His eyes grew wider, but his expression went neutral as quickly as it changed. He was a fucking liar and I don’t understand why he needed to ask me all these stupid questions if he already knew the answer. I never told him I overdosed. Just that I attempted suicide. I had dirt on him. 

“Thomas.” He warned, raising his inflection on the second syllable.

“So you knew my name as well… I said ‘Tommy’, you ass hole...” I breathed between clenched teeth. I regained composure and continued, “Okay, okay. Why did I overdose? Well, I was in Juvie and I figured they’d let me take it easy over here if I did that. And they did. And they even lowered my sentence over it. It was hard to collect all the pills, too. Took a lot of planning. I didn’t get caught, either. Write down that I’m pretty fucking smart for me, okay? Oh, I’m also a Taurus if that helps any. Just thought of that.”

He raised an eyebrow, and wrote something down. I doubt he wrote down what I said, but I like to imagine he did. He sighed, ignoring the latter of what I said. He then clarified, “You attempted suicide in order to escape your situation at Juvie with the intent to manipulate your court sentence? What were you feeling at the time? ”

“I don’t have them.”

“What?”

“Feelings. I don’t have them.”

“That’s not true. Everyone has feelings. Tell me about what was going on in your head when you did it, then.” His patience was thinning, and I relished in that. I have a special talent in getting on people’s nerves. It’s a talent, it really is. 

Thinking about the nature of the question grounded me back to reality, though, and I started to get all depressed again. The fear I felt, the thought that I could have actually died. It was all so much. I looked down at my feet again, slouching down in the chair. My voice was quiet. “Well, I was mostly scared that they wouldn’t find me and that I’d die.”

“Leading up to it. What were you feeling?” His lack of sympathy for my emotional state of post-attempt distress was jarring. He just wanted the right answers, and for that I knew he was a sociopath.

“Well, I was depressed I think. I don’t have a diagnosis or anything, but that’s your job.” My head shot back up with the quip, and I started bouncing my knee a bit. He wrote something down, and recapped the pen again. He put it down on the clipboard.

“Alright, let’s talk about that, then. Explain what feeling depressed means to you?”

“It took you eight years of school to ask me what depression is?” I laughed out, wondering how far I could take this. 

His back straightened out, and he sighed deeply. He had a face that said: how am I going get anything through this guy’s thick skull? He swallowed.“Yes, I went to eight years of school to learn that symptoms present themselves differently from person to person. And I’m not willing to say “depression” yet, but we can say you were feeling “depressed”.”

“Alright, Smart-ass. I felt really sad for a couple months. Kind of empty. I wanted to die most days.” I leaned back, staring him in the eye when I spoke. I felt all professional-sounding all of a sudden. I was a stupid kid. He wrote stuff down. That was starting to piss me off. I was a person, not a goddamn case-study. I continued, all slow-like, “sounds like depression, doesn’t it?”

He nodded, but decided to explain the entire fucking DSM-5 to me,“It could be bipolar. It could be hopelessness induced by your ADHD not being treated well enough. It could be a personality disorder or handful of other things, which is why I need you to talk to me.”

I was talking. He just wasn’t listening very much. I knew I didn’t have bipolar, and I figured I’d save some time if I explained that to him. “Well, I don’t get… What are they called? Manic episodes? I don’t get those.”

 

He nodded again, and wrote something down. I wanted to fucking scream. “I’m going to give you a paper, and I want you to circle any and all of the symptoms you have. Even if it's only happened a couple of times” He then unclipped his board and carefully pulled out a paper that he handed to me. I took it, and the pen he was offering me. I hate pens. I hate not being able to erase. 

“So, you’re not actually going to do your job then?” I muttered, and I think that was some sort of tipping point.

“This is doing my job, and I think you would feel more comfortable putting to paper your feelings than having me ask about these sensitive topics, am I right?” He snapped in a short voice. During the second part of his speech, his voice turned a bit more level-headed, because I think he realized it was his job to deal with me

I quickly nodded, and I started circling stuff. We talked about it after. He gave me a couple other papers, too. We talked about those as well. We also talked about my childhood and what I did to be arrested and everything. At the end of all of it, he looked down at all his notes, then back up at me. He paused. It was silent for what felt like 6 hours. Finally, he said:

“So, does this sound right to you: We decided that you have ADHD, Major depression, and Panic Disorder; and we’re still talking about the possibility that you potentially have ASD and General Anxiety Disorder?”

“Yeah, I think I spent just about two hours talking about that, but my memory is foggy. Do you think you could explain literally everything to me again?”

He once again sighed out, “And that exactly takes me to my next point. Do you know what Conduct Disorder is?”

“Never heard of it. That means its bad, right?”

“None of this is bad, necessarily,” He explained, but he wasn’t convincing, “It’s just something we’re going to have to treat”

“Oo-kay? So what is it, then?” I sat on the edge of my seat in some state of curious excitement. Conduct Disorder. That sounded serious.

“I think we’ll talk about that in conjunction with GAD and ASD next time I see you. Does that sound good to you?”

“Sure thing, but what is it?” He tapped his pen on his clipboard, looking up in deep thought. Was he going to tell me? Did he even know what it was. The prolonged silence made my nerves tense. Was it rare? Untreatable? Why hadn’t I heard about it before? I started bouncing my knee, and when that did nothing to calm me down, I started to ramble at the guy.“Fuuuck. It’s bad isn’t it. I already have like twenty disorders. I’m fucking crazy, aren’t I?”

“I only diagnosed two disorders, which makes a total of three And they are all very common as far as mental disorders go. There’s no reason to panic--”

“That’s not what my Panic Disorder would say!” I kind of laughed through a yell in half-amusement, half panic. “Way to go, telling the kid with the mental disorder not to panic. ‘Oh, you’re depressed? Just be happy!’, that’s what you sound like!”

“That’s...That’s not what I was saying.” he started collecting his things. “We’ll continue this on a later date. I have another patient I need to see.”

“Okay, okay. Goodbye, dude. See you later.” I continued sitting, because I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to get up or not. Dr. Vlahos motioned for me to get up once he was at the door, and he waited until I was out of the room before he closed the door. He stayed in the room, and I watched some nervous-looking girl with a blue undercut walk in after me.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for taking so long to post this. Things got busy with finals and AP tests and this story wasn't getting much traffic. Hopefully I'll get to posting on a more consistent schedule.

I was taken to breakfast. That’s when I finally got to meet everyone, because otherwise I had been in my room or being interrogated by the psychiatrist. Remember my first description of Juvie? Guys are girls only mingled during meal time and group therapy and the other various activities. Otherwise, we were separated. They liked order and routine there, too, but they weren’t as anal as they were in Juvie about rules. It wasn’t so totalitarian, but it was still a tyranny. Like imperialist England, not Soviet Russia, if you get what I mean. 

Everyone was already eating when I walked in, and the around twelve people there all turned to stare at me. I froze. Their eyes all probed me like some eldritch being right out of a sci-fi novel, and I felt exposed. It’s strange how people think they can get to know a person just through a first glance. I wondered what they thought about me. Was I strange to them, or just some other guy? Did the way I walked give some unspoken tell about my character, or was it perhaps the way I brushed my hair that ticked them off about something I didn’t even know about myself? I hated that people were always trying to figure out a person so they could use that information against them later or something. I quickly sat down, not wanting to draw any more attention to myself. This tactic usually always worked, but it worked to do the complete opposite here. People just don’t understand boundaries. I hate that. 

I began to feel like Lisa when a group of two girls and a guy sat down to join me from their previous table, all loudly carrying on with their conversation as the walked over. I thought that by sitting alone, people’d get the hint that I wanted to be alone.

They stopped conversing upon seating themselves, and the one blonde spoke up, “I’m Margo, this is Alison,” she motioned to the girl with dark hair, “And this is Keith,” she said about the guy. He also had dark hair. They both looked startled and put on the spot when Margo introduced them. She was the alpha-female. There’s always an alpha of the group. I guess that’s just how the world naturally put itself together, but the pushovers of the world would never feel comfortable without the assertive people. I wasn’t a pushover, so I wasn’t going to associate with that group. It was still the polite to introduce myself, though. 

“Tommy.”

“Nice to meet you” Margo held out her hand, and I slowly rose mine to meet hers. I hate shaking hands, but I also hate the uncomfortable situation it creates when you don’t shake the hand a person wants you to shake. Touching people just feels so personal. I hate that. Margo had a firm and enthusiastic grip. I decided then that she was probably in there for suicide. It’s usually the extrovertedly nice people who are the suicidal ones.Well, that’s not true. It’s usually the extrovertedly nice people who attempt suicide.The introverts just think about it. You’d know what I mean if you ever go to a mental place. Once you take the step to attempt, you just leave so much of your character behind that you have to compensate by taking on some new character. I swear, those who’ve tried to die become these parental ghosts over others so that they won’t follow in their shadows. That’s why they were extroverts.

“What are you in here for?” asked the guy, Keith. Alison shot him daggers and elbowed him in the side. I thought that was funny. I really didn’t care that he asked that in an emotional context, but I still wouldn’t talk about it for safety reasons. Why the fuck did he want to know? I grew suddenly suspicious, but I bit that down. They were just kids. I was just a fucking kid, but I somehow felt superior. Don’t know why. 

“Uh… The court said I was mentally ill.” I compromised. There was no way I was going to admit to being suicidal, and I needed to build a reputation. I don’t know. Maybe they’d leave me alone if I told them I was a criminal.

“Yeah, Keith came from Juvie, too.” Margo, with all the bravado of a Roman soldier, admitted for Keith. He looked utterly defeated. She was blunt. I really liked her. But my bad reputation plan wasn’t going to work.

After recovering, Keith took a sudden interest in me. Dammit. “Where were you? Maybe we were at the same place?”

“Yeah, probably not…” I trailed off. There was no way I was going to become friends with this guy. Just by the way he held himself, I could just tell he was an ass. I scanned the other two in the group, and they seemed nice enough. I wanted to test how sane they were. “What are you guys in here for?”

Alison jumped on the opportunity to answer that as if her only purpose in life was waiting for me to ask that question.“Did you know you could be locked up here for doing pot? Yeah, I didn’t either. But apparently I have ADHD. That’s pretty cool.” She looked like she had ADHD. It’s a real shame that girls never get diagnosed with it until they’ve already become suicidal about it and everything.

“Well, what did you think would happen? With the pot, I mean. It’s illegal. What about you, Margo?”

“Rather not say at the moment.” So it was suicide. She seemed pretty calm despite it. I wished that I could shake things off as well as her. I was pathetic. 

“That’s cool,” I started nonchalant, “I overdosed in Juvie. Took a fucking age to accumulate enough sleeping pills to overdose.” I admitted, more to get her to than anything. I wanted to know whether or not to assume her position here.

“You sound surprisingly unfazed. Are you doing okay?” Asked Alison, who took Keith’s piece of toast in return for her eggs in an unspoken deal. I passed my toast over to Alison, but she promptly put in back on my plate. “You’re pretty skinny there, kiddo.” The bitch.

“Yeah, whatever. Doing fine. And I just have a fast metabolism.” I gesticulated by dramatically taking a bite from the toast to get her to stop making a big deal about it. So it wasn’t just the staff who were fucking anal about everything. Perfect. I’d got a bunch of little thought police in training running around. The word had hit me in the gut all of a sudden. Kiddo. “Hey, you can’t be much older than me.”

She laughed softly as if she’d gotten that a lot.“I look young. I’m seventeen. And you’re what, twelve?”

I scoffed through my nose, waiting to speak until after I was done chewing. It took a while, and everyone was surprisingly patient in anticipation. “I’m fourteen, actually.” I swallowed, resuming, “I look young as well.”

“Yeah, it’s your height,” She explained to me, as if I wouldn’t have known that already. I found that hysterical. “It’s fine though, you pass for fourteen(“No I don’t”); Please tell me you’re in high school as well.”

“Nope, sorry.” I felt kind of bad, because she was so ready for me to say yes.

“I’m fourteen, too.” Said Margo. Keith wasn’t so willing to jump on the topic, and he remained in deep concentration. Apparently eating food warranted some level of concentration. Who knew? 

“How long have you guys been here?” All of them just seemed to close. I had to ask.

“I’ve been here for…” Margo began to extend her fingers and count them out, “Three days. Yeah. Keith’s been here a while, and Alison. You got here yesterday, right?”

Alison nodded. “Yeah.”

We talked and seemed to get along pretty well. I started to understand how they were so close despite the short amount of time. Mentally ill people just get along in a way that neurotypical people would never understand. Especially the depressed ones. Margo was there for attempted suicide, she admitted, and Keith there for a fight he got into. He had ADHD. It seemed everyone had ADHD and for some reason, that bothered me. I’m really an ass sometimes, and I had this strange desire to be “unique”, whatever that meant. I was one of the only people I knew growing up with the disorder, and now it seemed like a character trait that could be hastily applied to everyone. Or maybe it was just that ADHD wasn’t as innocent seeming as people stigmad it to be. It isn’t laziness or bad parenting, it’s a real disorder that causes real problems if left untreated. I also learned that Alison played violin with the city youth orchestra, Keith was pretty much the best there was at playing World of Warcraft, and that Margo wrote poetry when she wasn’t painting. I thought it was pretty funny that he was so ready to admit his addiction to World of Warcraft. You play that game, right? Maybe you’ll have to show me how to play it sometime. Anyway, the meal time didn’t last too long. Soon enough, we were being herded out of the dining room, of course only after they made sure the anorexic kids ate. I regretted lying about having an eating disorder, because now I was being watched like a hawk. They made me finish the two bites of eggs I had left. Yes, two bites would apparently make me gain twenty six pounds or something.

I learned that there was no formal education in depressed kid boot-camp. We had, in no particular order, breakfast, alone time, activities (mostly art), lunch, group therapy, rec time(mostly the TV room), dinner, and whatever we had to do individually. When the weather permitted, we were also allotted time outside. They stopped giving us outside time after we boycotted physical activity and nearly, and of course jokingly, rioted. People weren’t violent here like they were in Juvie. And we did have one day of formal education. There was this one guy who was there who insisted on doing his school work. There was a part of the wall painted green and he worked out lessons on the board in chalk for us. It was the funniest thing, swear to god, but some kids literally started having panic attacks when he explained quadratics to us. The nurse had to stop the lesson because of the deep-rooted trauma those kids had from their math classes. I didn’t even take algebra 2 and I got all panicking over their adamant distaste for the subject. We enjoyed his lesson on King Henry and his eight wives. There was a little song for it and everything. “Divorced, Beheaded, Died: Divorced, Beheaded, Survived”.

Staying there got lonely pretty quickly. Since apparently three months was a very long time to stay there, every time I’d meet a person they’d be gone. Margo, Keith, and Alison were out of there pretty quickly. The most anyone else had stayed there was two weeks and the average was around five days, so it was me and the staff against the world kind of thing. They all got to know me and my emotional episodes very well. I mean, most of the time I was fine, but the thing about me is that there are times when I’m just awful. I’ll be angry all the time and refuse to cooperate with anything. That only lasts a couple hours, and a couple days at most. 

I think it was because everything was just so boring after the first month. There’s only so many times you can do toxic-free watercolor paintings before it gets old. I truly felt like those Tuberculosis victims of the early twentieth century who spent their dying last months in a sanitorium. Except I wasn’t dying. Sometimes I liked to imagine I was, because it made things more interesting. I wouldn’t even get out of bed sometimes, but the dying game grew old. The last two months I spent trying to see how much shit I could get away with, but that grew old, too. Even though there are awfully rude staff there, the nice staff makes you feel guilty doing anything out of step.

I was out after three months and I only ever went back once after a second suicide attempt. That was in freshman year of highschool and I almost failed that year. I never went back to Juvie before I did the thing that I know you know, so I don’t need to write it down.


	9. Chapter Nine

After 9 months out of the house, I had expected my mom to be more excited about me returning home. Except she wasn’t, and I don’t know why it hurt me so much, but it did. The entire car ride home was painfully quiet after I realized she wasn’t listening to what I was saying. I started explaining all the great people I had got to know, and all the funny stories from the hospital, but she never said anything back. She just looked straight out the front window with this tight look on her face. So I did the same thing. When we got home, she turned to me with this awful expression. I still remember it clearly like the day it happened. Her brows were furrowed and her lips thin in this disappointed way. Her eyes were red from crying, which for some reason made me want to cry too. I didn’t. She then just looked at me, took a deep breath, and quietly said “Go to your room. I need some time to think.”

So I did.

The next couple of weeks followed with that kind of tension, and it was never even resolved after that. I think she was just happier when I was gone. I don't blame her.

I started school the next month. It was not the highschool I was going to attend before I went to juvie, but this school for troubled kids. My crime wasn't even that extreme, and it was completely justifiable, so I couldn't understand why my mom would send me there. I wasn't violent and didn't have poor "conduct". My mom didn't even ask me if I wanted to go there. She just signed me up without saying anything. And yes Teddy. It's "the school".

Before you laugh in disbelief, I want to swear on this, because it’s true. I wouldn’t lie about this sort of thing. I was an honors kid. I am pretty smart, even if I don’t show it most of the time. Normal classes just bore me. No stimulation or anything, but those were exactly the kind of classes at this new “special” school. I was bored out of my mind. There was nothing to do, which is where I would usually turn to messing with the teachers, but these guys were strict about their rules. For instance, I would regularly get detention for forgetting my reading book at home. I have ADHD, so I can’t help the forgetfulness, but these guys were just like Juvie. They had “vision statement” to turn our behavior around. Pretty much all of my classes were like this, except for one of them. That was my history class.

Now, I’m not very good at history. It’s always been my worst subject, because memorizing facts and ADHD just don’t blend. If I have to sit longer than thirty minutes to study for a class, forget about it. I’m bouncing off the walls. But this class was different for some reason. I think it was the teacher.

Her name was Ms. Martin and she was the sweetest person in the world. She was pretty young, and I think that’s way I liked her so much. Young teachers just understand students better, and how is anybody supposed to help “troubled” kids if they can’t even understand normal kids? I think she was actually there to help, whereas the rest of the teachers were there because they had to be. Whenever I was upset, or anxious or anything, she would know. She’d ask me questions like “Is this day above a 5?” because we had this scale we’d use for my anxiety. If it was above a 5, I was allowed to go to the nurse and sit out of class. She’d also ask me if I didn’t turn in my homework if it was a bad day at home. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. I tried to be honest with her, but I’ll be honest now, sometimes I lied to get out of homework. 

One day, we just sat down at lunch and had a conversation that pretty much changed my life. It all started because I accidently might of said “queer” as an insult, but I didn’t really now it was wrong. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “You know I’m queer, right?” She asked me. I was nervous because she was the only teacher who liked me, and I thought I had ruined our relationship right then and there.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Martin” I looked down at my feet, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then how did you mean it? I just want you to know that your words affect people, even if you don’t know they will.” When I didn’t respon, she continued, “When I hear people say the world “Queer” like that, I don’t feel safe. I know you didn’t mean it like that, but if I didn’t know you, I would feel unsafe around you.”

She gave this long lecture about that, then she told me about her girlfriend and everything. I think it was that day that I realized I could be bisexual, because she explained that all to me. She then made me attend the GSA for a week. That stood for Gender Sexuality Alliance at my school.

“But Ms. Martin,” I complained, shifting on my feet. I did that a lot. It was a nervous habit of mine. “I don’t want people to assume I’m gay”

“That’s why we need straight people in the GSA.”

And that was the end of that conversation. I think going to the GSA really helped me grow as a person. I ended up showing up to the rest of the meetings that semester, and my mom was glad that I was being a participating member of the community, whatever that means.

 

I have nothing much more to write about. I know it’s been a while since I’ve written anything, but I’ve been really depressed. I hate to write about my feelings, but its true. Ever since Billy’s gotten all depressed, it’s gotten me all depressed. I don’t know how to stop feeling so down. It’s taken over my life. I think this is all I have time for right now.


	10. Chapter 10

I woke up one morning to a sign that I should have taken less lightly. To be fair, there was no way I could have known how much of an impact it would have on my life, but I should have. It would have been easier if I did. 

I can barely remember anything about that morning other than my own reflection in the mirror, as vain as it sounds. I wasn’t particularly more handsome that day or anything, but there just wasn’t something right about my appearance. My feet were bare and cold against the bathroom floor, and it sent a chilling shiver down my body as I strode towards the sink to brush my teeth. I had been feeling less depressed than usual, and I figured it would be symbolic or something if I started taking care of my hygiene again. My hand never made it to my toothbrush, or anything really. I stood there for a while, admiring the new silvery-white streak in my hair in the bathroom mirror. It was towards the front, by my ear I think, and it was tucked under a thick curl of dark brown hair. I probably wasn’t as panicked as I should of been. I was actually pretty excited. As much as I hate to admit it, I relished in the fact that I now had more in common with my favorite book character, Holden Caulfield. If your uncultured ass doesn’t know who that is, you should read the book. I’ll tell you who it is, anyway, but that doesn’t get you out of reading it. He’s from “The Catcher in the Rye”, and he’s probably the closest there is to me in a book. He’s this guy in the 50s with undiagnosed ADHD and depression and he fails at school and everything because of it, and he’s this really smart guy, anyway. That’s what I feel, anyway. A lot of people just think he’s this embodiment of teenage rebellion, but I don’t think that’s the case. He’s obviously got some problems and everything, and he’s not a “rebel without a cause” kind of character. He just feels alienated, is all. Too many people blame kids for their issues and never realize that it’s sometimes just out of their control. A lot of my shit was out of my control, anyway. I like Holden a lot. Holden has white hairs, millions of them, on one side of his head, and that’s the reason I was kind of proud of my hair and not too concerned about medical reasons for it or anything. I kind of just figured it was due to stress, because I was very stressed as it is then. Part of me also chalked it up to the fact that I could have been a mutant or something, like rogue, but that was a stupid idea. How hysterical is that? I thought that that was the most ridiculous thing I could have thought. It was because I didn’t have any powers or anything then.

I thought a good long moment about running out of my room to show my mom, but the logical part of my brain halted that idea. She was most likely getting ready for work, and she wouldn’t have been the most amused by the whole situation. She was never a morning person and took to yelling at me at every opportune moment, regardless if I was doing anything wrong or not. If I was pacing in the kitchen, or if I was “watching over her shoulder”, as she said, she was put in a foul mood the rest of the day. I couldn’t even breathe without being a problem to her. She would probably freak out about the hair, anyway. She’d rush me to a doctor or something, and I had a presentation in my science class that day on the different kinds of energy. Instead of making a fuss about it all, I covered up the situation by pulling on a hat that I found tucked away in my closet. Hats were never really my style, but my dad had gotten me one from his work travels one time. It was this navy blue Miami Florida hat, and let me tell you how god awful it looked on me. It was small, for one thing, meant for a child because I had been around 9 or 10 then. My hair was poking out all over the place, since I never brushed my hair then. It wasn’t because I didn’t care or anything, but anyone with curly hair knows that brushing it doesn’t work. It was also just an ugly hat design. It had this palm tree and little red circle on the left of it. I think the circle was meant to be the sun, but it was hard to tell. I was only going to wear it until I got to school, then I was going to show everyone the little white streak in my hair.

I ran down the stairs, skipping over every other one, and this afforded me a stern scolding from my mom. She was always complaining about how rough I was on the house and furniture, even if it was something small like running down the stairs. She turned around from the TV, which she always watched in the morning, and let out this big sigh when she saw me. “What the hell are you wearing that for?” She said, all tired and stuff. She waited for an answer, but I didn’t have a good lie so I just shrugged. “It doesn’t even fit you, come here and take that thing off. Where’d you even get that? You better not have stolen it, because if you did, I swear to God you’re not going to be very happy with yourself.” She removed the hat from my head as she talked, and pressed down the mess of it with her hands, which caused me to squirm some. I just hate it when people touch my hair. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been like that. It makes my skin crawl and I just want to hide. You know, the only person that has touched my hair without giving me that reaction is you. I don’t know why and I can’t explain it, so don’t read into too much. I won’t.

“Dad got it for me, remember?” I started rocking back and forth on my heels. This made my mom scowl a bit, but she quickly covered that up as if I hadn’t just seen it. She paused for a moment, staring down at the fabric in her hands. I don’t think she noticed the white in my hair. 

“Do you want me to buy you a hat?”She said, all sad all of a sudden. I think she was sad, anyway. It was hard to tell. She was never going to buy me a hat, but I think she just had this strong desire to prove that she was better than Frank. That wasn’t something hard to prove. “If you wanted one, you could have just asked. I would have gotten it for you. All you had to do was ask, you don’t have to be afraid to ask me things. Sometimes I think you are.” She rambled as she walked about, getting things ready for the morning. I nodded, pretending to listen to her. She always said she’d do shit that she never did. She promised that she’d teach me cook one time. We bought all the stuff and everything and she had me look up the recipes I wanted to cook. It was supposed to be this summer thing that we did. We never did it. A lot of stuff like that happened. She also promised that she’d get me art supplies or sign me up for an art class countless times. That’s also something that I never did. She also got pretty mad sometimes when I asked her to buy things, because we were short on money as it was. I don’t understand why she had to yell. All she had to say was “no” and then it would be over with. Instead she had to make me feel guilty for even conceptualizing having her spend money. That’s why I stole stuff sometimes. 

“Hey, Thomas, am I giving you a ride or are you walking?” She said all of a sudden. I think she was putting on her shoes or something at the moment. I scowled, glaring daggers into the back of her head. When she turned around, presumably to get my answer, I made my face normal again. “Well?” She continued, letting out another big sigh. 

“Tommy” I muttered under my breath, never once lifting my eyes from her. My mom furrowed her eyebrows at this. She stood up once she was done putting on her shoes, and she lingered a little longer in the living room to turn off the TV. I forgot what she was watching. She met me near the door. I was putting the rest of my school stuff into my bag, which barely contained the mess of folder-less papers and breaking textbooks.

“What was that?” She asked, reaching for her keys.

“My name isn’t Thomas. It’s Tommy.” She nearly exploded at that, once again letting out an unbearably long breath. She ripped her purse up off the floor, and turned violently to face me.

“I’m not playing this game. I don’t have the time or energy for it this morning. Just answer the question.”

“I’m walking.” I spat, which should have been an easy enough answer, but she continued anyway.

“Are you going to walk home, or do you have detention again?” I hated her for bringing up the whole detention thing. It was a completely unnecessary comment, and she knew very well that I had detention that day. She just wanted to make me feel like a miserable person, which I was beginning to feel like. I was starting to get all depressed again, and I got all snappy.

“Fucking hell, just let me leave for school. I can walk home.” I swung the door open for emphasis. I was a pretty dramatic person then, and pretty crazy sometimes. I was being all crazy then, I’ll admit, but I was just feeling all depressed and everything.

“Watch your tone, young man. I don’t think I’m going to offer you rides going forward if you can’t appreciate it. We’re going to have a talk about your lack of respect when you get home.” I was in no way looking forward to that, so I was going to spend some time with Nia after school if she was okay with that. 

I waited by the door for a moment, and since she didn’t continue scolding me or yelling, I stepped outside. Before I closed the door behind me, I gave in and decided to acknowledge her,“Yeah whatever. Bye”

“Have a good day, Thomas” She said, and I slammed the door as hard as I could. I heard her yell something, but I couldn’t make out what because I was already starting on my walk to school. I know that “Thomas” doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, and so I’ll explain why it is. The simple answer is: I don’t like the name. That should literally be the only reason I need for people not to call me that, but apparently I have to prove it. The less simple reason is that people only call me Tommy when they feel like I’ve proved it, if that makes any sense. People are always yelling at me, and are always mad at me. When they are, they say “Thomas”. When people aren’t so pissy, they say “Tommy”. The name has negative connotations, I guess. I shouldn’t have to earn the right to use a name that I like. To be entirely honest, and I’m going to hate myself later for even putting this to writing, I’m not a man. I mean, I am a man. I have a--you know what-- and I’ve grown up in a society that benefits me and everything with the patriarchy and all. I don’t feel like I’m entirely a guy though, even though I identify as one.Well, I don’t identify as one. I just use he/him pronouns and everything. And sometimes I do identify as a man. It’s confusing, and I’d rather not go into all the details. Tommy is more gender neutral I think. I tried to explain it to my mom, and she thought it was a “cry for attention” or something. She yelled at me, and we’d never talked about it after that. I’m in a weird mood now. I think that’s all I’m going to write for today.


End file.
